No Bull Business Blog

Are you stressing out your employees?

Excerpted from the Executive Report: Why Good People Burn Out – and How You Can Stop It

As much as you and your employees don't want to suffer from stress and burnout, you could be the "cause" of the stress. Here are some things to watch out for:

• Setting unrealistic goals. Imposing highly ambitious goals on employees will daunt and discourage, rather than motivate, them. If you have tough goals they must achieve, break them into smaller parts before presenting them.
• Looking at the dark side. If you always look at the downside or harp on what's wrong - and allow others to do it - you can bet employees will become de-motivated and stressed. Instead, mention the bright side of every tough circumstance you and your people face. Encourage employees to suggest changes for things they don't like.
• Us vs. them talk. Managers often don't want employees angry at them, so they unintentionally remove themselves from potential guilt. (For instance, "I fought for your pay raise, but you know HR makes the final decision.") Leaders need to stand behind decisions they've made or have been made regarding their employees.
• Allowing some people to slide. Managers who let poor performers get by or allow bad behavior to continue will derail good employees. Confront those issues until they're fixed or gone.
• Talking more than you listen. Whether you deliver bad news or offer an opposing opinion, your employees will want to vent about it. Let them, because that may be all they need to get over it.
• Jumping to conclusions. One person rarely knows how another person feels, so avoid telling employees how they should react or feel in any situation. Let them react and then talk about solutions.
• Poor listening. Nothing is more irritating than not being heard. Paraphrase, take notes or do anything to show employees you care.
• Reacting to anger or anxiety. This only adds fuel to the fire. Instead, keep an even tone and deal with similar situations uniformly.
• Bad habits. Ask a trusted colleague (or loved one), what habits you have that can get on people's nerves.

DIGGING DEEPER

So, are your employees stressed out? Find out what you can do by reading the Executive Report: Why Good People Burn Out – and How You Can Stop It.

Rookie managers' biggest mistake

Excerpted from the Executive Report: 9 Mistakes New Managers Make Most Often

New managers persist in doing their old jobs rather than the new one. It's the No. 1 classic mistake almost every manager makes upon first being promoted. The good ones recognize it pretty quickly and make the needed change.

But many continue to make this same mistake over and over, even though they know they shouldn't.

It's tempting for a new manager to fall into the trap of wanting to be productive and doing the job he or she performed so well - the job that got them promoted in the first place.

One main reason managers continue to do their old jobs is they haven't yet learned how to delegate the work effectively.

They hang onto every little task themselves and eventually burn out. While this burnout is underway, the people who report to them fail to grow and eventually burn out and feel unmotivated, too.

DIGGING DEEPER
Rookie managers generally have talent, yet they’re missing one key ingredient to be successful – experience. But with guidance, they can avoid the mistakes that can derail them. Get the Executive Report: 9 Mistakes New Managers Make Most Often.

You can't treat every employee the same

Excerpted from the Executive Report: 6 Dumb Ways to Kill Morale - and What You Can Do to Fix It

It's human nature to look at other people through our own prism. When people are very different from us, we have a much more difficult time understanding where they're coming from. Two people facing identical problems or sets of circumstances often choose very different actions.

Does that mean one is smart and the other is dumb? As managers, we may see it that way, but the different actions most likely have very little to do with smarts or lack thereof. People do things more because of their own intrinsic nature than because of any real or perceived lack of expertise or intelligence.

Managers who play to people's strengths do a better job of making new hires work. The easy part is to identify skill sets. It's much harder to identify the behavioral nature that fits the job - that's where most mistakes in people management are made.

DIGGING DEEPER
Managing people is the hardest thing we do. Motivating them and keeping morale up is never ending. For help, read the Executive Report: 6 Dumb Ways to Kill Morale - and What You Can Do to Fix It

Is delegating a dirty word?

Excerpted from the Executive Report: Taking Control - 163 Ways to Save Time.

Delegating is a dirty word to many people.

Because doing it properly takes time and energy, they often think: "In the time it would take me to teach someone else to do this task, I could do it myself."

Or: "The only way I can be sure this task will be done right, is if I do it myself."

Here are two reasons to toss out both those ideas:

• Look at the big picture. While it may take more time than you'd like to explain how to do the task the first time around, it will save huge amounts of your time in the long run.
• Perfectionism is one of the biggest time-wasters. Are there some tasks that need to be perfect and require your expertise? Absolutely. But there are so many more tasks that don't need to be perfect, and where "good enough" is just fine. Productive people know how to tell the difference - and so can you.

DIGGING DEEPER

For most managers, working harder really isn't an option. But they try to do it anyway. But there are plenty of ways to streamline your job, eliminate distractions and get others involved. For help, read the Executive Report: Taking Control - 163 Ways to Save Time.

Recipe for conflict: Comparing one employee to another

Excerpted from the Executive Report: Dealing With and Eliminating Unacceptable Behavior

A rule of thumb when dealing with unacceptable performance is to avoid comparing the employee to co-workers. That just creates more problems.

Instead, focus just on the person in front of you, giving a straightforward assessment.

For instance, it should never be "You only do six of these a day, and Beth does 10."

Instead, it should be "You do six of these a day, and there is room to do more. I'd like to find a way to build you up to eight, or even 10. What do you think of that? What do you think we need to do to help you get to that number?"

DIGGING DEEPER

One of the biggest headaches that managers have is dealing with inappropriate behavior in the workplace. For additional help, see the Executive Report: Dealing With and Eliminating Unacceptable Behavior.

Get a grip – toss the paperwork

Excerpted from the Executive Report: Get More Done in Less Time

 

Even though a lot of communication comes via e-mail, we're still not a paperless society. And the paperwork that flows into our office can kill productivity if handled poorly.

 

Here's how to tame some of the paper:

• Sort and handle papers in the inbox only twice a day.

• Throw out rough drafts once the final is done.

• Highlight the important info on a document to avoid having to sift through it again.

• Toss memos immediately after you mark the date and info on a calendar.

• Request summaries and recommendations with lengthy reports. And create them when you write your own reports.

• Keep these folders to file what you receive and don't toss

• • To do (for things that must be acted on by the end of the day
  • Reading (for long reports and industry publications)Personal (for the good-to-know stuff
  • Training (for useful info on personal and professional development)
  • Upcoming events (details you need that aren't written on the calendar)
  • Projects (one for each that is current)

• If you put something aside more than three times, ask "How likely will I ever need it?" If the answer is "Not likely," toss it.

DIGGING DEEPER

Getting leaner means being more efficient. Good managers can’t afford to waste time. For help, check out the Executive Report: Get More Done in Less Time.

5 ways to salvage a difficult employee

Excerpted from the Executive Report: The Supervisors Guide to Managing and Motivating Difficult Employees

 

Firing a difficult employee is always an option, but it's not always the best option. Salvaging the person and turning him or her into a productive and reasonably cooperative employee is often better for the company.

 

But to do that, you must shift the responsibility from you, the supervisor, to the employee. The employee has to become responsible for changing.

 

After all, it's the difficult employee who has to change, not you.

 

There are five key steps for shifting the responsibility for changing:

1. Clarifying expectations. Tell the employee exactly what you want, in the way of performance or behavior, or both. And make sure the standards can be observed and measured. That's why you don't want to say, "Fix your attitude." There's no standard of measurement for that.

2. Provide training. You can't push someone out to sea alone in a boat and expect good results. Arrange training, and work with the employee to decide what training is appropriate and reasonable.

3. Specify consequences. Let the employee know the consequences - the bad ones for failing to change and the good ones for implementing change. That gives them a goal to shoot for.

4. Provide feedback. You can't expect the road to change to simply have a start and a finish. There's a whole area in between where you have to let people know if they're making progress and how much or how little.

5. Remove obstacles. Ask the employee what's preventing change. If you can control and remove the obstacle, do so. If it's up to the employee to remove the obstacle, make that clear, too.

DIGGING DEEPER

Getting difficult employees to turn over a new leaf isn't easy. To get help, check out the Executive Report: The Supervisors Guide to Managing and Motivating Difficult Employees

When you absolutely need to touch it more than once

Excerpted from the Executive Report: Get More Done in Less Time

 

We've all heard it. The most efficient folks only touch a piece of paper once.

 

Truth is, that's often not possible.

 

Most paperwork that comes across a busy executive's desk needs more than a minute's attention.

 

So it'll likely need to be touched more than once.

 

But the real key is that you take some action every time you have to touch it. Some possibilities:

• post a date on a calendar when real action needs to take place

• file it

• trash it

• make a call to followup or initiate action, or

• delegate someone to read or act on it.

 

DIGGING DEEPER:

Execs who get the most done and are the most effective are the one's who don't waste time on low priority issues. Get help by reading the Executive Report: Get More Done in Less Time.

10 Mistakes Rookie Managers Make Most Often

Excerpted from the Executive Report - Motivating Employees: What Every Manager Needs to Know

Managing is hard work – motivation is even more difficult.

Many managers and supervisors were promoted into their jobs simply because they were the best at performing a set of specific tasks among a team of people.

However, becoming a manager requires different skills, skills that the recently promoted employee may never have been trained to do.

No wonder so many mistakes are made.

Here are 10 typical mistakes made by first-time supervisors:

1. They persist in still doing their old jobs, rather than their new ones. As a result, they don’t delegate; they burn themselves out while the people who report to them can’t grow and thus feel unmotivated.
2. Out of a sense of insecurity, they sometimes view smart new people as competition, rather than assets. As a result, this de-motivates the people who could well represent their best hope for making the team a success.
3. They can be so afraid of making a mistake that they make no decision at all. By their indecisiveness, they lose the respect of their people – and with the loss of respect comes the loss of any chance to motivate people.
4. They fail to consider the consequences of their promotion on their former relationships with teammates. You can’t be best friend with a subordinate.
5. As a result of these factors, new managers play favorites based on former friendships. That destroys the morale and motivation of everyone else.
6. They see themselves as crusaders. They represent their people against the company, which is bound to end in disaster – or the other way around, which is guaranteed to turn everyone into an enemy unmotivated to perform.
7. When pressured to act unethically, they’re afraid to take a stand and do the right thing. Loss of integrity in the eyes of the workers will inevitably result in de-motivation.
8. They fail to adequately communicate laterally other managers, as well as up to their bosses and down to their own team. To be properly motivated, people can’t be kept in the dark like mushrooms.
9. They fail to reach out for help, thinking they have to be all-knowing. Admitting one doesn’t have all the answers can be an important factor in gaining respect.
10. They’re either too direct or too indirect in their dealings with their subordinates. They have a hard time finding a middle ground.

DIGGING DEEPER
Getting the most from your staff is critical. It's hard to achieve high productivity if employees aren't motivated. To find out what you can do, you invited to check out the Executive Report - Motivating Employees: What Every Manager Needs to Know.

5 ways to turn negative employees positive

Excerpted from the executive report Handling Difficult Conversations with Employees: What Every Manager Needs to Know.

Conversations – especially those dealing with emotional issues – rarely follow a logical pattern or system. Every conversation is a little different.

You can’t shoe-horn a conversation into a pattern or system. What you can do, however, is develop a method for getting the other person’s feedback and moving toward a desired result. This five-part conversation method and system has worked for many managers when they’re seeking a change in behavior or performance. A step-by-step example of dealing with someone who’s always negative and critical of others’ ideas:

1. ‘When you ... I feel ...” You can use this to set up the problem: “When you say, ‘That’s a dumb idea,’ I feel as if you’re being disrespectful to the person who offered the idea, and you discourage others from speaking up.”

2. Wait for their input. This is one of those points when your silence can be golden and when you can put into practice one of the “don’ts” we described earlier – “Don’t feel as if you have to fill every silence.”

Let your “When you” sentence hang and wait for a response. And here’s where it gets a little tricky, because you can’t be certain of the response.

The person may deny it, in which case you’ll have to give examples: “I can describe at least three times in the last week ...” Or the person may say, sincerely, “I didn’t realize I was doing that.”

Sometimes, too, the person will offer an excuse – valid or invalid. For instance, the response may be, “I’ve been losing a lot of sleep because of migraine headaches, so that may account for some of it.”

If you believe the excuse is valid, take steps to help or accommodate the employee. That’s what supervisors are supposed to do. Even if you do that, you still can move on to the next step.

3. “I would like ...” Here’s where you describe, specifically, the change in behavior you’d like to see: “I would like you to come to the next meeting with at least three ideas of your own on how we can improve.”

That sets the standard and results in positive terms: “This is what I want you to do.” Instead of “This is what I want you to stop doing.”

Consider how that works in any number of conversations involving performance or behavior. For instance, the person who’s always
coming in late.

Negative: “I would like you to stop coming in late.”

Positive: “I would like you to be on time every day.”

4. “Because ...” In almost any situation, you have to provide a reason for requesting change (other than “because I said so”).

Again, try to stay positive: “Because I know you have a lot of good ideas, and I think we’d all benefit from hearing them.”

That beats the negative attack mode: “Because we’re tired of hearing your criticisms.”

5. “What do you think?” You’re asking straight-out for feedback here, and you’re doing so with more than one purpose:

• You don’t want the person to walk away with the feeling that he or she has been given some iron-fisted orders.
• You can move toward a commitment from the person to change.
• You’ll get a real feel about whether the conversation worked and you’re headed toward a desired goal.

Try this system the next time you’re in a difficult conversation, and see how it helps to get you where you want to go.

DIGGING DEEPER
Every manager has at least one negative personality on the staff. Who do you deal with those folks? For help, check out the executive report: Handling Difficult Conversations with Employees: What Every Manager Needs to Know.

The headline memo: And how it stops time wasters

What can you do get people to come to the point and stop wasting time? Your time, my time, the company's time.

Try limiting all internal communication to a one-page memo, with a headline that conveys the benefits.
That's how they do it at Semco, the company run by Ricardo Semler that has inspired innovators like 37signals.

In Semler's book, he writes: "If you really want someone to evaluate a project’s chances, give them but a single page to do it — and make them write a headline that gets to the point, as in a newspaper. There’s no mistaking the conclusion of a memo that begins: “New Toaster Will Sell 20,000 Units for $2 Million Profit.”

This philosophy's been adapted by 37signals. They say it has reduced unnecessary paperwork, and helped  avoid meetings that were often needed to clarify ambiguous memos. "Concision is worth the investment. The longer the message, the greater the chance of misinterpretation."

One-page memos take some practise. Employees at 37signals sometimes had to rewrite them five or ten times before managing to synthesize their thoughts. This wouldn’t have surprised Mark Twain, who once apologized for writing a long letter because he didn’t have time to write a short one.

You can read more about how 37signals has adapted Semler's philosophy or buy his book at Amazon.

Posted by Julie Power, editor, Internet Marketing Report, www.eIMR.blogspot.com

Listening is an act of love

Two chairs, a friendly face and a willingness to listen.

That's all it took for a communications manager with a midwest retailer to change how her company listened and responded to employees.

There's a lovely post about it by marketer Patrick Schaber at Lonely Marketer who describes how Jill (the communications manager) got honest feedback from employees. It's a great story for any manager thinking about how to talk to customers or employees.

Jill (a friend of Patrick's) plopped down two chairs in the heart of the busy corporate campus and put up a sign with a topic of the day. She occupied one chair and waited and waited.

She waited long enough that someone finally sat down and talked. Word spread that she was genuinely interested in what people had to say. Soon people were lining up waiting for the chair.

Taking notes, Jill passed on their feedback anonymously to upper management.

Here's the copy that is used to advertise The Chair:

"The Chair" is designed to spark open, face-to-face, one-on-one conversation with employees in the simplest way possible: by offering employees a topic to talk about, an empty chair to sit on and an Employee Communications team member to listen to them (really listen - without a laptop, cell phone or Blackberry in the way). "The Chair" gives us a pulse-check on employee opinions, thoughts and ideas, while giving employees a place to be heard. "The Chair" is set up every other Wednesday from 10:30 a.m. to noon for corporate employees, with plans to expand it to store employees in the future.

Why did it work? I think for the same reason that the NPR Storycorps' project has become such a success. Since 2003, almost 30,000 people have sat down in little booths to tell strangers their life stories. Each session starts with a simple request, "Tell me about your life."

StoryCorps' Dave Isay says that he realized how many people felt "completely invisible, believe their lives don't matter, and fear they'll someday be forgotten."

He's compiled the stories into a book, "Listening is Act of Love."

You can read more at The Lonely Marketer.

Posted by Internet Marketing Report editor, Julie Power, www.eIMR.blogspot.com 

3 little ideas that make a great company tick

Here’s a great case study from ReadWriteWeb on how 37signals has become one of the country’s leading software companies.

1. Watch for red flags:

Little words can make all the difference to productivity. 37signals tries to avoid words or phrases that often cause misunderstandings like:

• Can’t:  "We can’t ship the product without a feature."
• Easy: "Your job is easier than mine." Ouch.
• Only: "You only have… to work harder, rebuild the software platform, shoot for the moon."

2. Question your work

To ensure it focused on the right things, the company developed a list of questions as a guide. They include:

• What problem are we solving?
• Is this useful?
• Are we adding value?

3.  Make tiny decisions

Instead of agonizing over huge decisions, the company encourages everyone to break big decisions into a series of little ones. The impact: You gain momentum, you get to celebrate small victories and if you make tiny decisions you can’t make big mistakes.

You can read more about 37signals, including its list of questions to improve workplace productivity here. Or check out the report on the Internet Marketing Report Online blog.

DIGGING DEEPER
Getting new managers up to speed is key to running a successful business. Too often new managers are learning on the job. And that means they make mistakes that can hurt productivity and morale. To give them a head start, get them up to speed with the Executive Report: Turning Good Employees into Great Managers.