The consultant took a group of employees and asked them, one by one on video tape, a series of questions. Here’s an example.

“Why do your clients value you?” came the question. “Because of our superior technical capability,” came the same answer, person after person.

The CEO knew this wasn’t what his customers really valued, and knew he had failed to communicate reality to his own team.

I was that CEO those many years ago, and I was relieved when the consultant brought back the real answer from our customer survey and helped me educate my troops.

The real answer? “Because we can count on you. You always solve our problems, no matter what.”

That was the real value we provide and what set us apart from any competitor in the eyes of the customer.

A good customer survey can help you determine your real value in the eyes of your customer. Knowing that can be the key to creating exceptional performance.

A Customer Survey Brings Truth

What’s that saying? He/She who has the gold makes the rules? Well the person answering a customer survey has the gold…

The shocking truth about reality is that it isn’t your reality that matters the most.  It’s the customer’s perspective on reality that really determines truth.  That’s why a customer survey is so important – to gain the customer’s perspective.

There is perhaps no greater and more common disconnect between business and customer than over quality – quality of product, quality of service, what could be better about the experience, etc. I regularly see businesses who have swallowed their own marketing drivel that their quality is “industry leading” and will not budge from their position.

The reality is your stuff is only as good as the lowest price somebody is willing to pay, the lowest rating they’re willing to give it.

It is critically important that you place whatever pride you have in your own work product on hold and find out the honest reality of what your customers think because they determine whether or not you’re right.

That’s where a good customer survey comes in.

How to Make it Happen

When I conduct a customer survey, I aim to talk to about 20-25 customers.  I’m looking for a mix of current customers, customers the company is no longer doing business with for whatever reason, and maybe a few key vendors.

While online surveys are cheap and plentiful today, I find that the customer survey goes much faster and the response rate is much higher when you use the good, old fashioned, telephone.

Keep it short.  Five to ten questions that consume no more than 10 to 15 minutes makes an ideal customer survey.  Of course, when I’m conducting a customer survey and the customer wants to talk longer, I let them. But my promise is to only take a short amount of their time.

Topics to Ask About in a Customer Survey

Let’s take a look at my favorite five customer survey questions to dive into, and why.

What is your overall satisfaction with Company?

Ask this on a 10 point rating scale. Here, no matter what else you ask, you’ve got a good overall rating that can serve as a general point of comparison.

Do you approve of how Company managed finances, including budget, billing, etc?

Money is a sensitive topic. It’s where a lot of otherwise good relationships go wrong so we need to dive into it.  Again, get a 10 point rating here.

How would you evaluate Company’s communication with you?

Good communication makes or breaks a relationship, so we absolutely must dive into this top.  Once again, get a 10 point rating.

What would you change about Company’s operation or the way they do business?

Ever work with somebody that was great except for one nagging detail? That may be how your clients feel about you.  Let’s find out.  No 10 point scale. We’re just going for an honest answer.

How could Company obtain more of your business?

This one is revealing. Sometimes it’s a business development answer. Sometimes it reveals that the relationship is irreparably damaged. And sometimes it reveals that things that truly need to change to get better.  Ask it.

What Could We Improve to Become a “10?”

Perhaps the most powerful question to ask in the customer survey is “What could we do to become a 10 or whatever the highest rating you give?”

Think about it.  You’re asking the person to go on record with what precise improvement steps would qualify you as a perfect business partner.

If they can’t come up with any, they’re forced to revise their customer survey rating upward.

And when they do, now you know exactly what you must do to be an outstanding partner.

It is my experience that these “become a 10″ suggestions create patterns – they are not one-off suggestions.  Over the course of talking to 15-25 business partners in a customer survey, you’ll see a definite pattern emerge where everyone is suggesting that you do the same two or three things.

Don’t Do It Yourself

Now that you’ve seen how to do a customer survey, I have one final strong suggestion: Do not do it yourself.  Not in web survey form, not in telephone form.

The reason is simple. People will tell a neutral third party things in a customer survey they won’t tell you. I’ve had 15 minute phone sessions last an hour. I’ve had them heal relationships and restore business.  I’ve had the opportunity to draw out hurts and pains they didn’t know were there.

In the worst case scenario, because you are emotionally involved in your business, you may react and “snap” at something a customer says in a customer survey. What is supposed to be a safe customer survey turns into an attack. Ouch.

Find a skilled, unbiased facilitator and make the very small investment in having a third party conduct the customer survey for you. The information you gain through the customer survey will be richer and there may be side benefits from the effort.

Take It Seriously – Respond

I said earlier that the customer survey will, over the course of speaking to 15-25 customers, reveal the same 2-3 (or more…) things that everyone is suggesting you need to do to improve.

Do them!

Don’t let them sit. Come up with a plan – a written plan with action steps, deadlines, the works.

Remember, you’ve gotten your business community involved now, so now they’re expecting to see results.  You cannot let them or yourselves down.  If you run into trouble with how to move forward, reach out to a trusted advisor for help planning forward motion.  You cannot afford to lose momentum on this.

Why Customer Surveys Are So Effective

A customer survey is so effective because it illuminates reality from the perspective that matter the most – the customer’s, not yours.

That perspective will reveal both your true value, as well as any areas your customers think you need to improve.

You should be eager to gain the perspective the customer survey offers, and act on it. The sooner you do, the sooner you’ll be in command of information that will improve your performance and enhance your bottom line.


Free Guide: Action Planning Step-by-Step

Quickly and painlessly identify your most impactful issues and craft action plans using our step-by-step process.

Download your personalized report and action planning guide you can use to improve your the performance of your business.

If you’ve seen any leadership articles lately, you’ve been bombarded by the latest buzzwords: Employee Recognition, and especially Employee Recognition Program Development.

In fact, there are some consulting firms that have made Employee Recognition Program Development their lead focus – their core offering.

The idea behind Employee Recognition programs is that by expressly calling out and recognizing good performance, you can dramatically increase employee engagement, leading to even better performance. Recognition can be as simple as public praise to as complex as bonuses, flex time, and additional vacation time. Some programs incur little to no cost, while others plan for between 1-3% of an employee’s base salary to cover recognition costs.

I’m not here to convince you that Employee Recognition is bad.  In fact, employee recognition is a key part of building employee engagement – but only when done right.

However, the vast majority of what you’ll read about employee recognition is not only misleading but the way it’s touted can be downright damaging to the productivity of a company because it removes focus from the goals of the company, and I’ll show you how.

Nearly every article you’ll find on Employee Recognition is totally misleading because they don’t explain the larger context in which Employee Recognition ought to occur.  They make it sound like if you focus on employee recognition alone, your engagement problems will be solved, and that simply isn’t true. As with most things in business and in life, there’s more to it than that.

Employee recognition has it’s place and it’s most effective when it’s put in its place, and that’s what I want to talk about.

A Two Sided Coin: Employee Recognition and…?

The problem with most “employee recognition programs” is they take the focus off of productivity and goals and put it on employee engagement for engagement’s sake.  The truth is you can have both if you do it right, but just focusing just on employee recognition is missing the boat.

The larger context that employee recognition must exist in is Performance Management.  Want a simpler word?  Accountability.

Accountability is a two-sided coin. At its root and very heart is the concept that we have a goal for performance for everyone. The concept behind accountability and performance management is that everyone has an expected level of performance.  Everyone from the top key executives, to the line level office workers, to the clerks in a retail environment, to the custodial personnel. Everyone has a key role to play and an expected level of performance that, if not attained, will let the rest of the team down and the team simply won’t function as well.

This is a key concept: that the business has performance goals, and that attention shouldn’t be removed from those goals.  We can achieve engagement and employee recognition without ever removing our attention from our core goals.

When we measure actual performance against the established goal, there are only two logical outcomes.  Performance could meet or exceed the goal, or it could fall short.

When performance meets or exceeds the goal, that’s when employee recognition comes into play.  That’s when it’s time to break out the public adoration, the small gift certificates – whatever is appropriate to the situation and the motivations of the receiver.

But when performance falls short, that situation must be dealt with, too. There’s no room for this in employee recognition programs, and that’s why they’re the wrong focus.

Performance management celebrates success and recognizes employees for achieving defined goals, but it also deals with substandard performance by helping problem solve, getting employees and teams back on track, and intervening when necessary.

So if you choose to focus only on employee recognition, you’re overlooking half the coin. You’re letting substandard performance go unchecked. You’re unrealistically focusing on the positive at the expense of reality.

If instead you choose Performance Management, you still have employee recognition for excellent work, but you also have the reality check against performance that doesn’t measure up.

Focusing on employee recognition at the expense of performance management is like playing with a double headed coin where you’ve called “tails” – you lose. Take all performance into account.

Four Rules for Implementing Successful Employee Recognition

It would be one thing if the typical business were excellent at accountability and performance management and just lacked a little in employee recognition. But my experience says that’s not the case. The typical team and business struggles not merely with how to recognize success but especially with what to do in the face of failure to meet goals.

For that reason, it is a disservice to stress stand-alone employee recognition programs. And the key to overhauling any employee recognition program is to set it properly into an overall program of accountability and performance management, where it belongs.

So with that introduction, we can review some rules for running successful employee recognition not as a stand-alone campaign, but within the larger context of performance management.

Establish Objective Measures of Success

It’s easy to fall into the habit of “feel good” recognition – looking for areas where employees have gone above and beyond to do a good job – and rewarding those.  In fact, with clients who are new to the concept of recognizing, I often encourage this approach as a way to get started.

But don’t let that become a permanent habit.

Whether in management meetings, team or project meetings, or one-to-one meetings between managers and personnel, it’s relatively easy to build the habit of establishing individual goals.  If you need help building this habit, put a “Set goals” item on your agenda for the next few meetings. It should be your goal at the end of each meeting that each person walk out with clearly identified action items and/or goals, and clarity as to when those items are expected from them.  By the next meeting?  The meeting after that?

If we’re going to implement performance management properly, then the first step is to have clear what is expected from whom.

Measure Performance Regularly

A popular term these days is “organic” as in, “Our meetings happen organically.” This translates to: “Our meetings happen whenever the hell we remember to have them / get around to calling them / can’t avoid them any more.”

“Organic” is for food, not for meetings. Set them at known times. Measure performance religiously.  Some guidelines: I like to see the following meetings no fewer than:

• Management team: 1-2 per month;
• Project team: 2-4 per month; daily at critical junctures;
• One-to-One: 1-2 per month

It’s in these meetings that Expected vs. Actual performance is measured and we move on to Accountability: either Recognition or Corrective Action.

Recognize Performance that Meets or Exceeds Goal

Here is where all the other articles on employee recognition comes into play. By all means, when performance meets of exceeds goals, take a moment to celebrate! Business can be a bear and it’s not every day goals are met. It is legitimate to celebrate.

It’s also legitimate to ask “What went right?” and “How did we have this success?” and “Can we apply anything we’ve learned to anything else in our business to ensure success?”

When recognizing employees and teams, consider the following:

• Employees differ radically on what motivates them. If you’ve used the Success Insights Behaviors and Motivators Assessment, you can literally pinpoint whether recognition vs. money vs. something else may be most motivating. Otherwise don’t assume it’s money. It may be best to ask.
• Try small motivators: Public recognition, a “trophy” that is passed around the office, small gift cards to coffee shops.

Apply Corrective Action to Performance Not Meeting Goal

Don’t overlook the other side of performance – performance that doesn’t meet goals. If you fail to deal with these issues, employees find it disengaging and discouraging.

The key here is corrective action: What will it take to restore performance to the goal? That often means problem solving with an employee who is at wits end, coming up with a new approach, assigning fresh resources, etc.

Remember, our core concept is to stay focused on the goal. As you problem solve with the employee who owns that goal, remember that it is ultimately the company’s goal, not the employee’s. Ask yourself: Is he or she equipped to meet the need with the additional mentoring given, or are they in over their head? When you manage to keep the judgment simply about making the goal and not personal, it becomes much easier to see what is needed both for the individual and the company.

Doing Employee Recognition Right

So call me a curmudgeon but employee recognition on its own, in isolation, is a misappropriation of company resources that in the face of unchecked underperformance is seen as disingenuous and wasteful.

That’s why I’m stressing Performance Management, which incorporates employee recognition in its proper place, along side corrective action to create full accountability throughout the organization.

No, I don’t mean the job advertisement you post to Monster.com or a variety of other sites to find candidates.  In today’s cutthroat recruiting world those are best written as advertisements, luring recruits to your company and selling the benefits of working there.

I mean internal use job descriptions that make clear what is expected of the person in the position and what sort of support will be given.  I’m talking about job descriptions that serve as a playbook for how to do the job and how to ensure success in it.

And yet so many employers under-estimate the importance of such tools, don’t use them, and then wonder in amazement when their recruits who seemed so promising turn out to be so lost and aimless.

A New Job, From the Recruit’s Perspective

Let’s make the assumption that most people, when they start a new job, want to do a good job.  Wouldn’t you agree that they need to know what’s required of them?

Yet thirty six percent of companies don’t take any time to orient new employees or get on the same page as to what their duties are; they’re simply thrown in the deep end (Aberdeen Group, 2006).

Of those who do on-board their employees, even the best of the best lack a plan more than half the time and make up on-boarding as they go; the typical company almost always lacks a plan for on-boarding (Aberdeen Group, 2006).

This means the norm is that employees are not given good, complete guidance as to how to do their jobs.  Certainly, most are not guided by job descriptions or by any objective measure of how to do their job.  And without an objective measure of how to do the job, the whole basis of the job is in question.

For example, against what will the employee be reviewed when it’s time for a formal performance appraisal?  How can the employee or anyone know if they are gaining mastery of the position?  If a manager thinks the employee is performing poorly, how can that be anything but a subjective judgment unless masterful performance is first defined?

Definition of job descriptions is not an academic exercise.  And it’s not bureaucratic red tape only for big business.  It’s a fundamental duty of a good manager, and it’s meant to help everyone understand what success in the position looks like, as well as keep everyone honest about what’s not required.

Defining Job Descriptions

Job descriptions ought to be able to stand alone as a definition of the job and what it takes to be successful.

Yes, day-to-day guidance on individual tasks will be required. But by the time you’re done with a job description and an employee buys into it, they should be able to understand how to do their job, what is expected, what success looks like, and how they contribute to the overall success of the company.

Here’s where to start.

Statement of Purpose

In one to three succinct sentence, explain what the purpose of the job is. As you do, do so in terms of the value the job provides to the company: to furthering its mission and achieving its vision.  That is, this statement should make clear that there would be a hole in the company if the job isn’t filled.

Here’s a sample Statement of Purpose for a Sales Manager:

A producing sales person and a manager with ultimate responsibility to ensure that the account book is being maximized for the benefit of Company and staff.  Establishes and controls sales territories, systems of sales control, effective inside vs. outside sales teams, and an effective pay structure.

Responsibilities & Authority

Few things are as demotivating and disengaging as having responsibility but lacking the appropriate authority.  So take a moment and decide not only what the responsibilities of the position are, but also what level of authority the individual has.

When creating Responsibilities, use common sense to list out domains of responsibility rather than individual activities.  For example, individual Activities a Sales Manager might do include: 1) setting sales appointments, 2) going to sales appointments, and 3) writing sales contracts. But these things can be summarized under the single responsibility of “Produce your own sales.”

For assigning Authority level, choose between these pre-defined Authority levels:

1. Primary – Just do it.
2. Secondary – Do it then report.
3. Tertiary – Consult/get permission, then do it.
4. None – Do it only if instructed.

By assigning both Responsibilities and Authority levels, you create an informed, self-sufficient worker able to tackle their job in confidence

Performance Management

In all the job descriptions I’ve reviewed, not once have I seen Performance Management defined.  How, then, is anyone supposed to know what success in the position looks like?

Performance Management is the objective measure of success for the position.  That is, against what will the person in the job be measured in order that we may know if they are performing adequately?  This is absolutely critical to define prior to performance reviews, and critical to have decided prior to raising the flag of bad performance against someone.

Return to our Sales Manager example. Here are some sample Performance Management measures:

1. Personal Sales Productivity, measured as dollars per month.
2. Team Sales Productivity, measured as dollars per month.
3. Team Win Ratio, measured as Wins divided by Total Proposals, per month.

While these are just a few examples, you can see how these measures serve as objective indicators of performance and as an excellent basis for on-going goal development.

Qualifications

Not just useful in recruiting, Qualifications are helpful internally for two reasons.  First, they help identify a professional development path for the person in the job. Second, they help identify when others in the company have attained the experience to fill the role.

Take time to identify Qualifications in two categories: Required and Desired.  Required are exactly that: the individual must have equivalent qualifications to win the position.  Desired, however, are optional, and may serve as a good professional development path.

Other Considerations

Check with your Human Resources advisor and/or legal counsel about other things to add.  For example, most will want to specify working conditions and the like.

Bring It All Together

Job descriptions provide the opportunity to serve as a powerful engagement tool because they fulfill three key aspects of engagement: they inform employees exactly what is expected of them, they show employees how they fit into the overall organization, and they create a plan for success in the position.


Free Guide: Action Planning Step-by-Step

Quickly and painlessly identify your most impactful issues and craft action plans using our step-by-step process.

Download your personalized report and action planning guide you can use to improve your the performance of your business.

This conference focused not on technology but on the human side of BIM – what it takes for the people involved in construction to make a successful shift to this relatively new way of working.

An interesting aspect of BIM is that it combines people from different disciplines and especially different companies together on the same work team.  Although they may never have met before, their new found challenge is to get up to rapid speed with each other quickly and smoothly and begin to make progress.

That challenge, forming rapport rapidly and quickly creating a high performance team, was the topic of my presentation.

And then the conference organizers through a challenge at us: All presentations were made PechaKucha style.

If you don’t know what that is, that means no matter how complex the topic, we had just 6 minutes and 40 seconds to get our point across.  That translates to 20 slides for 20 seconds each.  And if you want to know how to pronounce PechaKucha, just click here.

The benefit of that is I can present the entire presentation to you, here, in just a couple minutes.

So here goes.

In a few minutes, my colleagues will talk to you all about collaboration

And over the past day, you’ve heard presentation after presentation stress the importance of fostering communication and understanding in teams.

I want to talk to you about how to get a team of human beings ready to collaborate with other.

Especially in an environment like a BIM project where they may have never met each other but need to hit the ground running.

Probably the most famous model of how teams go from newborn to exceptional is Tuckman’s Team Development Model

The thing is, I don’t care if you’ve never seen this model ever before.

I’m not even going to elaborate on the four stages

I don’t care if you know them.

They’re not the important part.

The important part is what it takes to move from stage to higher stage.

And in every case it’s based on relationships – based on knowledge of others around you.

It’s a little something Daniel Goleman calls Emotional Intelligence:

the ability to know and control your own emotions, and to understand and respond appropriately to others around you.

Emotional intelligence means big business.

It means safer, more productive work environments.

It means managers who outperform their goals by 20% or more.

The faster we help people understand how to work well together, the better the results we see.

So our goal is to collapse the time it take for teams to become highly effective.

Our goal is to equip teams with the information they need to build working rapport

To be highly successful in just one day, not weeks, or months – and certainly before the project ends.

The DISC Assessment is a standardized assessment that takes just 10-15 minutes to complete.

It has been validated for use in cultures throughout the world.

It is used in team building, coaching, and even EEOC and OFCCP compliant hiring.

Most importantly it is a measure of our behavior – how we act and react to what we encounter in life and at work.

DISC is not a personality test.  It is not like the Myers-Briggs.

It’s also not an intelligence test. I can’t tell how much schooling you’ve had, how smart you are.

And I can’t tell your politics or your opinions on sensitive matters, not that I care.

It’s simply a powerful predictor we can use to understand how you’ll react to situations.

DISC explains behavior along dimensions that make up the acronym DISC.

D stands for Dominance and represents how a person responds to problems.

Imagine how valuable it would be to know on day one that a person is aggressive, and that the best way to

Communicate is quickly, to the point, through short bullet points.

I is for influencing and looks at how a person responds to people.

A key element of that is trust.  Can I trust a person?

Because of that, the key way to communicate not only about trust,

But also about a picture of the future that they can trust, believe in, and get excited about.

S is for Steadiness and represents your response to the Pace of life.

The real issue at play is predictability. Steady team members want safe, predictably results.

So communication success comes when they’re informed of all risks, and safe alternatives are emphasized.

Finally C is for Compliance and how people react to procedures.

High compliance people desire ALL the facts. They’re determined to make the best decision.

So communication success happens when nothing is held back, but everything is presented systematically.

Bring it all together and you can start to see patterns in combinations

For example, Project Managers – highly problem-driven people who work by the book, thrive on craziness and check the work of others.

Or Superintendents, people who will navigate around a problem anyway they can to meet schedule and are obsessed with quality.

Here’s another tool for helping teams visualize how they relate to one another.

Each grey dot is a unique individual.

People with the same jobs tend to be like each other and tend to bunch together.

For example:

-Project Engineers tend group around Analyzer
-Project Managers tend to cluster under Implementor
-Superintendents cluster under Supporter
-Owners and Owner Reps tend to fall under the hard driving Conductor
-And Business Development appears under Persuader – Promoter

There are three main benefits to this approach and the first is true Self-Awareness.

Gaining a language through which to understand how I act and what I am.

I am a strong willed egotistical person, doggone it!

By knowing that, I can be in better command of my own attitude and responses to situations.

The second is differentiation.

This language helps me to identify in concrete and specific terms not only THAT other people are different from me, but HOW.

Recognizing these differences is the key step in emotional intelligence.

The third and final benefit is blending and it starts with some deep thought.

If through self-awareness I understand what I’m like, and through differentiation I understand certain others aren’t like me,

Then through a little thought I can figure out ways to blend better and that’s what we want for high performance teams.

For example, certain people just blend well, and certain people don’t.

The fast and hard style of the D and the slow and exacting style of the C tend to butt heads.

But the D can learn to give the C more time to think and decide, and the C can learn to communicate

In the staccato bullet point that the D so enjoys.

The results of taking this approach can be truly remarkable.

We’ve all experienced the benefits of rapport that takes weeks or months to build.

But by making rapport an objective and using this approach,

The ground work for a high performance team can be put in place in a day.

So the next time you go to assemble a team,

establish building rapport as an objective

and remember this option for accomplishing it in as little as a day.

For more information on using assessments to accelerate your success, contact Dustin Walling Associates.

photo by Eastop

I confess I’m a documentary junkie and my favorite kind are those that re-enact historical moments.

So give me Band of Brothers, the story of the formation of Easy Company’s formation and preparation for the invasion of Normandy in World War II and I am fascinated and can watch it again and again.

I’ll also confess that as a student of psychology, one of the most fascinating things to watch is the incredible bond that forms between the men.  “Band of Brothers,” it is clear, is no hastily picked title but is the true relationship between the men, who clearly fight for each other just as much if not more than for the war effort itself.  The bonds of brotherhood trump any order, any command from on high.

Creating Employee Engagement from the Bonds of Brotherhood

When it comes to employee engagement, some leaders don’t see how encouraging friendships at work fits in.  In fact, some are completely opposed to it.

That’s where examining such extreme cases as Easy Company can be quite informative.  There it is relatively easy to see how and why strong bonds of friendship would form and the important role they play.

For employee engagement, the question of loyalty is an important one but equally important is the question of where that loyalty lay.  Some leaders are afraid to create strong bonds of friendship and loyalty between employees because they think that will somehow detract from loyalty to the company.  On the contrary, creating these strong bonds IS creating loyalty to the company and that is the point we’re here to discuss.

Gallup notes that it’s not just ordinary friendship that should be fostered, either.  It’s very strong friendship, in fact, best friendship.  In Gallup’s findings this level of coworker engagement led to employee engagement levels found only in truly productive teams.

So let’s look at the three primary benefits from fostering this level of coworker interaction.

Better Employee Retention

Fostering friendship improves employee retention.  In every job there are recurring stressors, even breakpoints that take employees to their limits of endurance and cause them to choose whether to stay or go.  Having the benefit of a best friend at work gives the employee someone who not only truly understands them and what they’re going through, but someone who knows through experience that these moments do pass.

Additionally, it’s these battle scars, these moments of stress and of doing the extreme that remind us in some small way of Easy Company.  While the circumstances certainly do not compare, the reasons people do their job begin to look familiar.  People begin to do their job for each other and to help each other more than because of any order from on high.  And yet the irony is because the company is made up of individuals, by working for each other, we work for the good of the company.

Increased Productivity

Do you do things faster and more completely for people toward whom you feel indifferently or for people whom you really like?  For your best friend.  It just makes sense that when we respect, admire, and genuinely enjoy the company of the people around us, we try harder and put our best foot forward.

I’m describing a dramatic uptick in employee engagement. But to achieve it we didn’t do anything to the organization, per se. We emphasized close bonds between the employees.

Higher Profitability

Higher profitability is a classic outcome of increased employee engagement. It’s just in this case it is the source of the increased engagement that is interesting.  By encouraging best friend relationships, retention improves, productivity improves, and profitability improves.

Employee Engagement Begins with Friendship

So examine your own attitudes toward employee friendships to see if you’ve been holding back from encouraging your growth.

If so, ask yourself why you’re not making this critical investment in your own company.

by Craig Parylo

Have you ever watched one of those survivalist programs on the Discovery Channel?

You know the drill.  The survivalist is dropped off into the middle of nowhere to face conditions that would make a normal human being (you and I) crumple and whimper in pain.

And yet, no matter the odds, no matter the half-formed plan, they act.  Their key to survival? Immediate, purposeful action.

They have priorities they know they must fulfill – things from the base of Maslow’s hierarchy. Clean water, fire, shelter, and taking in more calories than they burn.

Saving themselves can wait. But all their energy must go into changing their environment to meeting these basic needs – to setting up the environment in which they can save themselves.

In business sometimes the situations are just as urgent and sometimes they’re not. Either way, change is called for.

But in business, there often times seems to be a higher tolerance for pain and status quo. Leaders will go longer without making the needed change.

Let’s look at some common reasons why this is and what to do about it.

Resistance to Change

In my work with clients, there are reasons I see again and again why leaders hold off on making change happen.  Do any of these sound familiar to you?

A Desire to Be Liked

Change rocks the boat, there’s no question.  While some change is seen favorably by employees and as a long overdue course correction, other change can be seen by some as restrictive when it is merely putting into place controls that should have been there all along.  That stirs feelings of discontent and perhaps even anger that can spill over into change management meetings and other aspects of daily business life.

A great number of charismatic leaders have an inherent desire to be genuinely liked by their followers.  Hence you can see the problem: Introducing change, even if it is the right change, which may cause their popularity to go down is a big deal.  It’s more than a question of popularity in fact: to them, it’s a question of their effectiveness as a leader.  For in their mind if they are not well liked and therefore well followed, how can they lead?

But there’s something that this leader is overlooking.  Results always come first and gain respect, and the vocal minority can make it easy to lose sight of that. What I mean is doing good work, making good profits, and having those profits to share with the team must always be the first priority over personal standing and gain.  In fact, by keeping that priority first and managing the company well, the irony is the leader becomes better respected and more liked.  So aim to be liked for the long term by putting the right changes into place.

A Failure to See Results

Change management is often not a short-term proposition, as compared to, say, sales.  With sales, you invest some effort, you get some sales.  You invest some more effort, and more than likely you get some more sales.  More over, you get those sales right away, not down the road.

With change management, there’s an up front investment.  When you teach people how to communicate better, or invest the time to create better procedures to handle customer orders, the fact of the matter is that takes time and money out of the here-and-now on the promise of making it up down the road.

Some leaders are challenged to see the benefit.  In particular, quite often, “things are so busy right now” or “money is so tight right now” that it’s hard to see investing in a better way of doing things.

For these leaders, the logic of doing things better is not enough.  That’s ok.  Then take the time to work some numbers and see how quickly pausing to create better ways of doing things will reap benefits.  It’s shorter than you think, and the benefits continue on.

Fear of the Wrong Change

For some leaders, pulling the trigger on change is difficult because it’s hard to know that the planned change is right.

It may be the concern whether the change is safer or whether it is novel, untested, and experimental. Or it may be concerns over whether it is the best possible change for the circumstances.

At some point, these leaders need to make a more basic decision than whether the change proposed is perfect: Is the change proposed better than the current situation?  If it is, they owe it to their company and themselves to march forward with full faith.

Change Priorities

Just like the survivalists, businesses should have priorities when approaching change.  Here are my recommendations:

• Narrowly identify the target of change. Be able to state the change desired as a business objective.
• Know what can hurt you. Where will you face resistance? How can you overcome that?
• What must the outcome of change look like?
• How can we measure success?  How will we know we’ve achieved it?
• What is the value of this change to the company?

Changing Gears

There are many reasons companies and leaders may be hesitant to tackle change, but doing so is a highly profitable endeavor.

If you’re holding back, find and face the reason why, and let change start in your mind.

“SWOT” is an acronym that stands for, “Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.”  The process of the analysis is to review your business against each of these categories for important insights.  When conducted with your employees, it’s a good tool for building employee engagement as it helps create buy-in, identify priorities, etc. So far, you’re with me, right?

Recently, I facilitated a strategic planning event.  This is nothing new - I do these all the time.  Also not new was that in the strategic planning event, we conducted a SWOT analysis on the organization.

One thing new did occur, however – something I had never encountered before – when we got to “Weaknesses.”

“Excuse me,” one person interrupted.

“Yes?” I said.

“Can we not do Weaknesses?”

“Excuse me?” came my stunned disbelief.

“Can we skip reviewing Weaknesses.  Modern management theory knows it’s better to simply focus on building your strengths and avoid focusing on weaknesses.  If we review weaknesses we’ll get side-tracked by useless information.”

I wish I were making this up, but I’m not: it actually happened.

NO, that’s not what modern management theory knows.

Let me make this very simple: If you are an individual, go ahead, focus primarily on your strengths.  But if you are an organization, ignore your weaknesses at your peril.  Focusing on and obliterating your weaknesses is absolutely critical to fostering healthy employee engagement.

The Difference Between People and Organizations

For individuals, focusing the majority of your energy on strengths alone is healthy and does indeed promote higher levels of employee engagement.  Why?  Because when you’re focused on strengths and engaged in tasks that you enjoy, you tend to enjoy them more and enjoyment is key to employee engagement.

This is a key premise to a landmark book, Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton.

In this book, Buckingham outlines how much more effective focusing on strengths is for individuals and even offers a tool to help you find your own.

But that’s for individuals.  Organizations are different.

There’s another key to employee engagement (one of many, actually).  And that key is the ability for an employee to do their job.

An employee may enjoy their job, but they may not be able to do their job effectively.  Why?  Perhaps because they are restricted by rules put in place by corporate higher-ups that don’t understand working conditions.  Or perhaps they don’t have the right resources for their job – such as the wrong or outdated software, slow computers, or the like.

The reasons why ability may be restricted are endless, but most come down to the same category of thing: weaknesses of the organization.  And all have the same result: decreased motivation, and decreased employee engagement.

For Employee Engagement, Ruthlessly Find and Fix Your Weaknesses

So by all means, if we are talking about you as an individual, pick up a copy of Now, Discover Your Strengths, find your strengths, and figure out how to capitalize on them and incorporate them more centrally into your life.

But if we are talking about your organization and I’m facilitating your event and helping do your SWOT analysis, then you bet, we’re going to talk about Weaknesses.  They kill productivity, motivation, and employee engagement.  It feels good to get rid of them and turn them into a Strength.

Do not ignore your Weaknesses.  Find them and fix them.  Your employee engagement will improve because of it, and your profit margin will thank you.

I remember the first time I did CPR on a real human being.

I was terrified. For a moment, I forgot how.

I had all this training.  I had even trained others. I was even a freshly minted EMT.  And I was about ready to soil my pants, terrified that I might do more harm than good.

And then I remembered back to something that one of my trainers told me.  It’s gruesome, but it’s true.

“If you’re to the point where you have to do CPR on someone, don’t worry about doing any harm.  They’re already dead.  It can only get better from here.”

Now, is this some intense analogy by which I’m suggesting that some of your employees are dead to the world and need resuscitation by whatever means necessary?

That’s precisely what it is.

The worst part is often times many of us are nervous about getting our hands dirty with accountability for fear of doing more harm than good.

I’ll say something similar to what my CPR instructor said: You can’t do damage to someone who is already dead to the world.  And that’s exactly what some of your employees in need of accountability are.

What I Mean By Accountability

Accountability is relatively simple and consists of three parts. First, the type of accountability we’re talking about is necessary because of the commitments made between individuals in a group to each other.  It is inherently social. The group succeeds because individuals keep their commitments.

Second, accountability is an opportunity for an employee to gain genuine feedback about their performance – its completeness, fitness, and match to the job called for and agreed upon.

Third, accountability is an opportunity to retain, gain, or lose something of importance to the employee.  Good performance may simply see a retention of the same responsibility, or it may see an increase in authority for a given project.  By contrast, failure to perform will see the employee lose something: responsibility for a favorite charge, the freedom to move on to a new task, etc.

For me, success is expected and so accountability is meant to be a celebration of success.  Those things done well we learn from and apply more broadly to foster greater success.

It is when performance is not good that the penalty side of accountability comes into play, and that opens a whole other discussion.

The Common Attitude to Accountability

Occasionally, I get resistance against calling people to task in a public forum.

Age old wisdom says you must discipline in private or risk alienating your employee.

“Praise in public. Discipline in private.”

Hogwash.

Praise in public? Why yes, nearly always.

Discipline in private?  Not so fast.

If you have a true discipline problem – i.e. someone acting out of line, breaking rules, etc. – then yes, by all means, discipline in private.

But accountability and discipline aren’t the same thing.  If you have an accountability issue, you take care of it in the group.

Why?  Three simple reasons.

1. In accountability, the group member made the commitment to the whole group in public and is accountable to the whole group, not any one person.  One person may speak, but accountability is dealt with by the group.
2. It often takes the whole group to solve the problem, suggesting alternative plans the group member can follow to success.
3. If the group member is removed from the task, the whole group must immediately step in as appropriate to cover the task.

If you have an accountability problem and fail to deal with it publically, in the group, you’re doing possibly irreparable damage. First, you’re wasting your most valuable solution resource, your group, that may be able to help your group member. Second, you’re sending the message to your group that you don’t take accountability and their role in it seriously.

And then there are those employees who need resuscitation at any cost.  Those disengaged wonders who aren’t even in touch with reality. Let’s take a look at the difference between the engaged and the disengaged.

Honest Efforts Deserve Simple Accountability

Business revolves around keeping commitments, does it not?  Business is an endeavor of you and I making promises to the group that we will deliver something by a time to a certain positive effect for the group and the organization over all.  It is the keeping of commitments, really, that makes all aspects of business happen.

In business today, there are thousands of reasons why sometimes even the best plans and the best efforts don’t lead to success.  Sometimes team members just need a little more time or to try a little harder, and sometimes a reboot in approach is required. You can easily come up with a list as long or longer than mine as to why this happens.

But when a team member is engaged, there are three points that stand out.  First, they fully understood the task they committed to, and that understanding did not waiver from commitment to deadline. They owned the task completely. They owned failure to achieve.  They made no excuses for failure.

Second, the group member clearly tried.  They made their best effort. They attacked the problem.  If they weren’t sure about something or simply needed an extra hand, they asked for help. They literally did everything they could do in order to attempt to make a solution happen.

Third, they failed.  They didn’t make it.  They came up short.

In this case, any accountability to be handed out is matter-of-fact. More than likely the group member is made to finish the task.  Having the team involved here is valuable because often the best suggestions for success come from the team.

Everything Else Deserves Trial By Peers

When a team member is disengaged, three points also stand out, but they are radically different from those in the previous section.

First, all too often I find that people understand tasks they commit to far better when they make the commitment than when the deadline comes around. When the task is due, suddenly they claim that they were “never clear in the first place” (and couldn’t find clarity along the way?).  In other words, their story changes.  Additionally, they never truly owned the task as their own. This is commonly expressed as “I never got the support I needed.”

Second, the group member did not clearly try.  There is no evidence that they made their best effort or that they attacked the problem.  This is often experienced as a lack of engagement by the team member with other staff regarding the task at hand, as well as the group member defending their lack of progress with what are clearly basic questions and issues about the task.  My favorite bad behavior here is for the group member to blame the group or various others for the task not being done.

Third and finally – no surprise – they failed.  They didn’t make it.  They came up short.

Re-read this section.

There is nothing similar between the behavior listed here and the behavior in the section where I’m recommending private discipline.

The behavior in the prior section was of hard work, ownership, and honest attempts.

The behavior here is of procrastination, changing stories, lack of engagement, and blaming others.

In fact, let me make it much stronger and more accurate in the process: The statements made and the defenses offered by a disengaged group member quite often do not match reality.  It is no challenge to prove them wrong, yet they stick to their quasi-delusional story

You absolutely cannot let an employee, no matter their rank or station, get away with this sort of disruptive behavior.

Accept some harsh facts right now:

1. This employee is not simply not performing, they’re checked out.  They’re temporarily dead to the world.  For this moment,  they’re poison.
2. Their ability (or lack of ability) to get away with this behavior will have a direct impact on the engagement of the rest of your team.
3. When you fail to deal with them involving the team, you set a new, lower (demoralizing) standard for the rest of the team, and you lose the team as a valuable resource to bring them in line.
4. You should not be afraid to deal with them harshly for fear you might lose them.  You already have lost them.  Your job now is to win them back.

This person is a disruption.  You need to deal with them publically because you need the team’s help.

Accountability, a Public Affair

Let me be perfectly clear. The ultimate nirvana is a world in which positive, proactive leadership works all the time and gives rise to an environment which employees find naturally engaging. And furthermore, that employees naturally engage to their fullest and achieve to their utmost. It is incumbent on every leader to strive for this environment first and foremost.

It is also incumbent on every leader to live in the real world.  And that means the need, regularly, for accountability.

Accountability and discipline are not the same thing.  Accountability, based on a public commitment between peers, is a public affair.

I probably saw my first in First Grade and I was hooked. What started as a tall, empty vase of a thing, slowly filled with my favorite color – RED – marking off PROGRESS! as we brought in more and more money.

(I probably should have figured out then that I was destined for consulting, but sadly that took much longer.)

It was like a First Grader’s Key Performance Indicators Nirvana.

Are you as Smart as a First Grader?

The thing is, even a first grader understands you don’t simply get to color in the thermometer.  The point is to collect the money for the United Way.  The point is taking action.

And First Graders are great because they get genuinely excited by the progress that the thermometer represents, and genuinely motivated to do more in order to color that RED in just a little bit higher.

I wax nostalgic for a little more of that innocent excitement and motivation each meeting I go to where key performance indicators are involved.

Much of the time, my adult colleagues have lost sight of what my childish counterparts know. The adults are all too focused on reporting out on current status, and on simply reporting out on what color all those thermometers, levers and dials are.  They have lost sight of the fact that the point of key performance indicators isn’t reporting out, it’s action.

If you’re going to go to the work of setting up key performance indicators – and you should – it’s important to know the right way to use them.

The Right Way to Use Key Performance Indicators

Here are the top things I communicate to my clients about using key performance indicators.

1) Key Performance Indicators should be measurable.

Particularly when defining key performance indicators for individual people, it’s easy to slip into the pattern of saying something generic and useless like, “Performs up to standards.”  The entire point of key performance indicators is to define those standards in measurable terms, so come up with something measurable.  For example, for a sales person, define a satisfactory level of call activity, of meeting activity, of proposal activity – anything that can be counted, measured, and improved upon.

2) Plan for the Performance of your Key Performance Indicators.

It’s one thing to start measuring key performance indicators in your business, like customer satisfaction.  It’s another thing to set a plan for their movement, but that’s exactly what you should do.

Beginning with the current month as your baseline score, chart out 12 months into the future. Now for each of the key performance indicators you’re measuring, write in a goal for each of the 12 months.

This does two things. First, it immediately creates a smaller and more achievable goal. Instead of raising customer satisfaction 10 points for the year, we only need to raise it half a point by next month.  Surely we can come up with enough ideas to raise it half a point. Second, the focus is immediately action oriented.  The key performance indicators are still front and center, but they are now prompting what they’re meant to prompt: assertive, problem solving action.

3) Establish Action Plans.

Surely we can come up with enough ideas to raise customer service by just half a point by next month.  So do it. Write those ideas down into the form of an action plan in terms of what needs to happen, by when, by whom.  And while you’re at it, shoot for a little more than a half point improvement.  It’ll give you a jump start on the following month’s goal and help you recover if part of your plan fails.

Remember: the point to key performance indicators isn’t simply to inform the business of current status, but also to inspire action.

4) Employ Key Performance Indicators in a Balanced Scorecard approach.

Many times, business owners in particular get focused on key performance indicators surrounding financial measures. But financial measures are what we call “trailing indicators.” Lots of things have happened in the business long before the financial measures happened.  It’s wise to get closer to those events so you can know about them more closely and take action.

That’s where a Balanced Scorecard approach comes in.

In Balanced Scorecard, the aim is to take key performance indicators measurements from across the business, increasing your insight. For example, my current four areas to sample are:

• Employees and Learning – Because by investing in training and skills we produce better products and service.
• Process and Quality – This is a huge area of inefficiency and loss for most companies. By honing things here, we improve customer service and the bottom line at the same time.
• Business Development – This covers marketing, sales, and all activity toward winning business for the firm. If it’s not happening, the firm isn’t happening.
• Financal - Each of the things above contributes directly to a healthier bottom line.

What you might want to measure in each of the four categories will vary based on your business.  But the point is the same: sample key performance indicators from across the business rather than any one narrow area.

Outsmart that First Grader

The fact is it is genuinely exciting when you see the full picture that key performance indicators can paint of your business – almost like your business in HD. And it is genuinely motivating when you see a clear and obvious plan unfold before you to take small but powerful steps forward.

Put these plans into action and soon it will be a “keeping thermometer” you’ll be coloring in, tied directly to your increased bottom line.



Free Guide: Action Planning Step-by-Step

Quickly and painlessly identify your most impactful issues and craft action plans using our step-by-step process.

Download your personalized report and action planning guide you can use to improve your the performance of your business.

(And now every one of my clients will think I’m writing about them personally – this conversation has played out that often.)

Employee engagement is the dream and passion of many a business leader. For a lucky few it is a realty, while for most it seems a far off fantasy, a mirage in the desert of management life.

There are no shortage of articles and books of how to chase the rainbow. No lack for opinions on how to find the engagement pot of gold.

There’s just one problem.

Most advice on employee engagement is incomplete, misleading, or just down-right wrong.

It’s the Wrong Question

Most advice on employee engagement stops at the question, “How do I achieve excellent employee engagement?”  From there, the discussion invariably changes to initiatives and strategies to take to attempt to improve employee engagement.

There’s just one problem.

Employee engagement, like motivation and so many other people issues in business, is not something you can do anything about directly.  Rather, it is an outcome.  Specifically, it is the result of solid leadership.

So the real question is not ”How do I achieve excellent employee engagement?” but rather, “How do I improve my leadership and what impact will that have on employee engagement?“

You can’t ignore the real cause, the real basis, Leadership.

Let me take another example, sales.  Let’s pretend your revenues are down and you want to do something about it.  You could decide that you will make more sales calls on your existing customers and new customers and that should increase your revenues.  And you could stop there.  But you’re ignoring one important thing: Marketing.  By spending effort on marketing, you establish the environment into which you sell, and sell more easily.  And your sales should go up.

By spending time on leadership, you establish the environment which encourages employee engagement and motivation, and it’s through these efforts that you see improved employee engagement.

So How to Lead for Employee Engagement?

The beauty about realizing that employee engagement is the result of quality leadership is that the core focus can remain on building exceptional leadership of the business and employee engagement will continue to improve.  There’s no need for specialized initiatives, and in fact, unless an initiative addresses core leadership, it no longer makes sense.

There are core leadership principles to highlight as especially important to employee engagement.  Those include the following:

1) Clearly Communicate Direction

It is no accident that this article is coming right after my three week series on Business Values, Vision Statements, and Mission Statements.  It is absolutely key to creating an engaging environment that employees know how and where they fit and what they are working toward. That especially includes having clarity on these business fundamentals.  These things are so fundamental that many people take them for granted or don’t take them seriously.  Don’t make that mistake. Have them clear. Share the clarity with your people.

2) Flatten External Client Engagement Where Possible

Research shows that employees are more motivated and engaged when they understand their place in the system. One thing you can do as a leader is to flatten that system wherever possible. Let’s use the idea of a manufacturing plant.  Can you think of ways you could humanize the orders?  At Caterpillar’s large engine plant, the name of the customer and where the engine will be going hangs from every engine as it travels through assembly and testing.  It’s not “just an engine.” It’s a customer’s need.

3) Equitable and Salient Rewards

Getting pay, bonuses, and rewards right can feel like more of an art form than a science, but it’s an important one.  There is nothing less engaging for employees than seeing what they perceive as unfair rewards, or being rewarded in ways they don’t care about (e.g. – more money when they’d prefer time off).  Today’s modern assessments can help determine these opportunities. Contact us for more information.

4) Meaningful Feedback

Meaningful feedback means feedback that enables improvement.  Constructive criticism as well as praise.  Environments that foster employee engagement tend to be characterized by leaders who are focused unquestionably on “What can we do better?” without dwelling on “What did we do wrong?”

5) Performance Management & Accountability

Employee engagement happens when leaders lead. People actually want boundaries. They actually like the word accountability.  They don’t simply like it for themselves, they like it for others around them.  They want everyone to be held accountable to promises and find it very demotivating when other employees “get away with things.”  Performance management and accountability levels the playing field so that everyone has a fair work environment.

Achieving Your Employee Engagement Outcome

There is nothing about the items above that is special to employee engagement.  There is nothing there that constitute an employee engagement “campaign.”  These are simply good, solid leadership principles.  There are many more and the more you implement, the stronger your business will be because of it.

The key is to remember that you establish the engaging or disengaging environment and the employee takes care of the rest. You will not win over all employees.

But the primary question is what can you do through leadership to establish as engaging an environment as possible?



Free Guide: Action Planning Step-by-Step

Quickly and painlessly identify your most impactful issues and craft action plans using our step-by-step process.

Download your personalized report and action planning guide you can use to improve your the performance of your business.