Poor Leaders are Costing Employers

One of the most important qualities a leader can possess is the ability to inspire trust in the workplace, however, it is something that appears to be on the decline within organisations. When trust declines in a workplace relationship, so too does productivity. Everything will take much longer and costs will increase, all to make up for that lack of trust.

Stephen M.R Covey, author of The Speed of Trust; the one thing that changes everything, calls the extra effort that goes into checking and validating employees work by leaders the “low trust tax”.
In the same way that when there is a lack of trust productivity goes down and costs go up, when there is a high level of trust, productivity increases and costs go down.

Covey believes that the need for trust in the workplace is obvious and it is a “financial, not just social requirement”. “"You can put a value on it," he said. "The ability to create trust is the number one competency of leadership needed today, more than any other”.
Trusting your employees, as a leader, makes you better at everything else that you need to achieve at work.

The thirteen behaviours that high trust leaders possess, according to Covey, are;

1. Talking straight – They say what is on their mind, and don't hide their agenda. Most employees don't believe their bosses are communicating honestly.
2. Demonstrating respect – Actions show leaders care. They should be sincere. People will notice if an action is motivated by a lesser reason.
3. Creating transparency – Leaders should tell the truth in a way that can be substantiated. Transparency is based on principles of honesty, openness, integrity and authenticity.
4. Righting wrongs – To right a wrong is much more than apologising. It involves making restitution. With customers it might include that free gift along with the sincere apology.
5. Showing loyalty – Leaders need to give credit to the individuals responsible for success. A leader should never take credit for the hard work of others.
6. Delivering results – The fastest way to build trust is to deliver results. 
7. Getting better – When others see leaders continually learning and adapting to change, they become inspired to do the same. Covey suggested two ways to get better. First, seek feedback from those around you. Second, learn from your mistakes;
8. Confronting reality – If leaders are honest about the difficult issues and address them head-on, people will trust them. 
9. Clarifying expectations – It is important to focus on a shared vision of success up front. When expectations are not clearly defined at the beginning, trust and productivity both decline. A lot of time is wasted due to leaders not clearly defining expectations.
10. Practising accountability – Leaders must hold themselves accountable, and take responsibility for poor results. It is a normal response to blame others for failure, but when leaders fail, they need to take responsibility for themselves.
11. Listening first – Actively listening builds trust. Leaders need to learn not to go through the 'mechanics' of listening and give the impression they are listening when really they are not.
12. Keeping commitments –This is one of the most important components of inspiring trust in the workplace. When leaders keep a commitment they build trust. Leaders must be careful when making commitments, and make only those they can keep. 
13. Extending trust - Leaders should extend trust to those who have earned it and are still earning it, but show caution to those who have given reason to believe that they are not capable of being trusted.

Essential HR Disciplines for Salesforce Effectiveness

Often, when HR professionals are asked why they aren't more involved, common responses include, a common response is that “Sales kind of does its own thing." Sales leadership does carry the main responsibility for sales effectiveness, however, Human Resources need to increase their involvement in salesforce effectiveness. Why? Basically, companies that do not involve HR in salesforce effectiveness stall their growth.

Here are three of the core Human Resources disciplines that help to drive salesforce effectiveness;

Talent

HR partners will often be requested to help Sales Management with recruiting specific job roles. Sometimes, the Sales team accuses the HR team of not understanding the skill set required for those jobs. The Sales & Human Resources teams need to work together and be able to strategise together. One key strategy would be to focus on talent, this includes; managing poor performance and providing better training for the sales team.

Motivation

The next core element of Human Resources that is vital to maintaining a high-performing sales team is motivation. Sales employees often have a different perspective from the rest of the employee population and are usually more motivated by product quality, marketing influence and achievable goals than their non-sales colleagues, and less motivated by performance management and equity rewards.

Compensation ranks high on their list of concerns, but are these organizations more productive because they pay more, or are they paying more because they're more productive? Paying at or above the market doesn't mean performance will follow. Pay and performance are vital components of salesforce engagement and motivation.

Productivity

There is a strong relationship between sales force effectiveness and time allocation. Companies who spend more time on sales, and less on other duties, such as administration, often have greater sales productivity.

Within any sales organization there is opportunity for productivity to increase and can directly translate to the company's growth. Sales organizations need HR disciplines to align talent with strategy, assess opportunities for increased motivation, and identify barriers of productivity. HR has a very relevant, hands-on role in contributing to sales force effectiveness.

Coraggio News Piece on Annette Dixon

Annette believes that humans are your greatest resource.  However, in reality, Annette also understands that your staff can be the cause of your biggest headaches.  End 2 End Business Solutions is to HR what aspirin is to headaches.  Annette eases HR pains by delivering various tools and support systems around the employee lifecycle - from identifying a specific need and hiring, all the way through to the exiting of an employee.

Annette shares in her client's’ vision and offers flexibility to take various paths in order to achieve the required results.  Having run a line operation that was customer focused, Annette brings a full understanding of the challenges facing managers.  Instead of focusing on the technical aspects of HR, her team understands pragmatic issues around the commercial aspects of running a business and delivers her services accordingly.

One of Annette’s most memorable clients had legal issues maintaining SLAs with their primary customer.  Whilst the situation was being resolved through the supreme court, Annette took over the management and operations over a 4 year period without missing any single criteria in the SLAs.  Once the legal issues had been resolved, the business had to be de-merged.

This new smaller business consisted of 40 staff and 5 customers.  Annette worked intimately with the business and lead the business in sales, service, regulatory and HR, delivering integrated human resource strategies and processes.  She rebuilt it over 2 years, successfully growing it to 170 staff servicing 70,000 customers.  This new business was then sold and returned $20M to its shareholders.  Annette offers these same strategies and processes to the customers of End 2 End Business Solutions.

Scaling up her business, Annette is looking to online technology to take her the next step.  She resonates with Richard Branson’s view - that if you look after the staff, they will look after the customers and profits.  It is reflective of what Annette has seen and delivered through good human resources practices.

Over the last 4 years, as a member of Coraggio, Annette’s strategic thinking and learning has increased.   Annette thrives on taking her clients from being a small entity with few staff and customers to growing them rapidly and delivering profitable returns to shareholders. 

Original Article here http://us7.campaign-archive1.com/?u=36a02bd3794feb7684d7f1cdd&id=64d499a57a&e=5d40509c82

Do you need to fix your culture so leaders can thrive?

If you have invested a lot of time and money into developing your leaders but are still not seeing the results you had hoped for then maybe you are focusing your attention on the wrong area. It does not matter how talented a leader is if they are working in a place where the culture towards them is negative. This may mean that you have to work on your culture in order to get the most out of your leaders.

How do you know if there is a culture in your workplace that is negative towards leaders?

Here are a few common signs:

• Staff have an “us against them” attitude with leaders and clearly view them as the enemy.
• Team members have not actually ever met their senior leaders and do not recognise them or know their names.
• Staff are often trying to catch out their leaders and belittle them
• There is often negative talk amongst team members about leaders
• Team members deliberately creating problems or testing their leaders to see how they will cope.

If you have noticed this kind of behaviour within your organisation then it might be time to work with your senior leaders to form better relationships with team members before investing any more time, money or effort into developing new leaders.

Here are a few ways to strengthen relationships between team members and leaders:

• Encourage understanding of shared goals and task. For employees to work together effectively, they must understand group and individual goals. When this understanding is poor, work inefficiencies, lower work quality and low employee morale often are the result. Lack of understanding over goals is often misdiagnosed as an individual performance management problem, when actually the team member is unsure of what the organisation expects from them.
• Provide team members with sufficient Knowledge and Resources. Managers can’t have a high performing organisation without capable and knowledgeable employees who are provided with the right resources and tools required to do their jobs. If staff are made to do work they are not qualified for, they will not be happy and their performance and the quality of their work will suffer because of it. Without proper knowledge and training, employees are likely to use resources inefficiently and become disheartened which leads to frustration and higher staff turnover.
• Communication. Ineffective employee communications lead to inefficient coordination efforts. Miscommunication causes poor information sharing and makes it difficult to get the right people involved at the right time to make the best decisions.  Effective interaction can encourage opportunities for combined learning for both manager and employee and greatly enhance employee job satisfaction. Effective interaction creates a culture of collaboration and encourages sharing of ideas and information.

Community Service Leave

Employees, including casual employees, are entitled to take community service leave for particular activities under the Fair Work Act, including:

• Voluntary emergency management activities
• Jury duty

With the exception of jury duty, community service leave is unpaid.

An employee is involved with a voluntary emergency activity when:

• The activity involves dealing with an emergency or natural disaster.
• The employee participates in this activity on a voluntary basis
• The employee was either requested to participate in an activity , or it would be reasonable to expect such a request would have been made if circumstances permitted
• The employee is a member of, or has an association with a recognised emergency management body.
• A recognised emergency management body is:
• A body that has a role or function under a plan that is for coping with emergencies or natural disasters.
• A fire fighting , civil defence or rescue body
• Any other body which is mainly involved in responding to an emergency or natural disaster including SES, the Country Fire Authority and the RSPCA.

Community service leave is likely to carry greater consequences in high risk and rural areas, especially during the summer when the threat of bushfires is much greater.

There is no limit on the amount of community service leave an employee can take however an employee who takes community service leave must give their employer notice of the absence as soon as possible and the expected period of absence. The employer can require the employee to give the employer evidence that would satisfy a reasonable person that the absence is because the employee has been, or will be, engaging in the eligible community service activity. An employer can face serious penalties for dismissing an employee that tries to take community service leave. A violation of a provision of the National Employment Scheme can result in penalties of up to $10,800 for an individual and $54,000 for a corporation.

Community service leave to volunteer in an emergency situation is unpaid leave under the National Employment Standards, although some State and Territory laws have created an obligation to pay employees for the time off. Queensland, Tasmania and Western Australia all expect you to pay ordinary wages during an employee’s absence.

Under the National Employee Standard, you are obliged to pay an employee jury duty for their first 10 days of service at their usual base rate of pay.

Minimising Workplace Negativity

There is nothing more detrimental to workplace morale than unrelenting workplace negativity. It drains the energy from a workplace and steals attention away from work.

As a manager it is important to stay closely in touch with employees throughout the company as this will allow you to sense any workplace negativity in its early stages.

It is essential to pay attention to employee complaints, exit interviews and employee discussions and feedback to pick up any signs of negativity. This information will help you learn to identify the symptoms of negativity before its consequences damage your work environment. It will also help you prevent future negativity and cure any current workplace negativity.

Negativity is a growing problem in the workplace, it is often the result of a loss of confidence, control, or community. Understanding what people are negative about is the first step in solving the problem.

Communicating with employees will help you define the exact problems and the extent to which these problems are influencing your workplace. One of the easiest ways to do this is to identify the particular employee groups who are experiencing the negativity and the source of the issues that triggered their unhappiness.

Perhaps the organisation has made a decision which has negatively affected staff or staff are feeling threatened or neglected by management.

Whatever the reason for the workplace negativity, these issues must be addressed.
Here are a few tips for keeping your workplace a negative free zone:

• Give staff opportunities to voice their opinions about workplace policies and procedures. Acknowledge the impact of changes in work hours, pay, benefits, overtime etc. on your employees.
• Treat employees like adults with fairness and consistency. Do not create rules for all your employees to target the few people who are doing the wrong thing. Keep the number of rules directing the behaviour of adults at work to a minimum.
• Keep your staff in the loop with what’s going on within the organisation. Provide the context for decisions and communicate regularly and effectively.
• Give employees opportunities to grow and develop. Training and opportunities for promotion are visible signs of an organisations commitment to staff.
• Make sure you give your employees appropriate reward or praise and recognition for a job well done.  Reward and recognition are some of the most powerful tools an organisation can use to boost staff morale.
• Listen, often people just need a sounding board. Be present and available to staff. 

Re-shaping Performance Management


Performance management has been a popular topic of discussion within organisations recently, with 96% of surveyed organisations having recently changed or planning to change their system within the next 12 – 18 months. As companies struggle with leadership, engagement, and capability challenges, they are realizing that the performance management process affects all of these challenges.

Many employees and managers are feeling dissatisfied and frustrated with the current performance management systems. However instead of completely over hauling current systems, the way to change will most likely require organisations to evolve the practices they already have in place.

New performance management models are now becoming imperative as businesses update and improve their talent solutions. Companies leading this transformation are redefining the way they set goals and evaluate performance, focusing heavily on coaching and feedback and looking for new technologies to make performance management easier.

Some essential changes are needed but some of the original elements should remain the same.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when changing your performance management strategies:

• Performance management is changing, not disappearing with the focus shifting from annual assessments to more continuous dialogue. The performance information gathered will be more constant and more relatable to what employees are doing at that moment instead of reviewing what they did six months to a year ago.
• Corporate culture and values are to become more closely aligned, with employers encouraged to enabling employees to do their best instead of “fixing” their performance.
• Different techniques for different areas of the workforce. Different jobs require different performance management criteria and systems.
• Disposing of the performance rating. Rating your employees is not helpful or productive. If ratings are not eliminated completely, they should at least be simplified into broader categories.
• Separate performance from rewards. Fixed approached based on performance ratings are dubious, especially when objectives are conditional or achieved through team collaboration.  Assessing someone’s skills produces inconsistent data. 
• Continuous feedback - the regularity, emphasis and quality of communication will change to enable more real time conversations about how the employee is going.
• Mobile technology should enable more immediate and personalised feedback.
• Managers need training to become leaders. Manages who have received development to become better mentors and coaches will focus conversations on capabilities and performance than faults or issues.
• Simplicity is the key. Much of the current performance management processes involve filling out paperwork, evaluating job rankings and developing unrealistic goals. The information that was gathered had little practical application for managers or team leaders.