Coach’s Corner – Responding to the most Frequently Asked Questions posed by our A-CHIEVE! publication readership…

QUESTION: What is the best way to deal with a difficult employee?

RESPONSE: Oftentimes the leader asking the question is hoping for a simple “terminate the person” reply. The reality is that termination is not necessarily the right solution at that particular point in time for several reasons. As we probe further, we oftentimes discover one or more of the following conditions:

• Clear and concise expectations, deliverable accountabilities and meaningful performance measurements have not been co-established by the leader and employee. Caution: a job description typically does not fill this void because: 1) content speaks to generalities vs. specifics; 2) the employee’s role may have evolved based on business needs and therefore, might not even resemble the original job description; and 3) job descriptions rarely include metrics. We recommend presenting the data in an easy-to-understand, easy-to-reference Performance Scorecard format, so expectation specifics, including deliverables and metrics, are crystal clear.

• Clear, concise, timely and actionable performance feedback has not been discussed with the employee. Caution: conducting semi-formal or formal performance reviews even as often as once per quarter does not fill this void if: 1) on-going performance discussions are not occurring as a natural part of engaging the employee on a regular basis; and 2) the employee is not provided with specific examples of both desired and undesired behaviors plus expected results. We recommend presenting the data in an easy-to-understand, easy-to-reference START | STOP | CONTINUE format, so expectation specifics are crystal clear.

•  A leader/employee stand-off. Both parties have dug in their heels, each embracing his/her own position (point of view) vs. both parties engaging in open, honest and candid dialogue in an attempt to discover the root cause(s) of the leader/employee disconnect, which is the first step toward co-designing a workable solution. Caution: someone must assume the role of ‘adult’ in this type of scenario. We recommend that the leader be the adult and with that, adopt the right constructive conflict attitude plus demeanor which includes:

– Actively listening to vs. tuning out the employee
– Being inquisitive & curious vs. close-minded & defensive
– Posing probing questions vs. taking positional stands
– Being personable vs. warlike
– Focusing on the facts vs. being drawn into or contributing to an emotional swirl
– Seeking out the truth vs. embracing untested beliefs, assumptions & conclusions
– Engaging in discussion richness vs. discussion rightness (aka I’m right – you’re wrong)
– Solving problems vs. winning positions
– Using positive, consistent word choice, tone & body language vs. negative, incongruent language

• A leadership opportunity for self-improvement. The world is continuously evolving and so must our leadership thinking, approaches and capabilities continue to evolve. Caution: one of the most challenging aspects of working with an employee that we perceive as being ‘difficult’, is being able to look past the employee’s persona, keep an open mind, sort through their messaging and, in doing so, objectively ask ourselves “What is it about our leadership style and/or approach that may be unintentionally contributing to the employee’s negative attitude and/or behaviors? As an example, a criticism that we frequently hear as we’re helping teams improve their performance results, is leadership inconsistency – where the leadership team is saying “X” but doing “Y”. When that occurs, team members become disenfranchised to a degree where some become quietly frustrated…others drift into a state of apathy…and a few act out and quickly become our ‘problem employees’. We recommend interjecting a healthy dose of self-reflection when working with a difficult employee because we may actually be contributing to the dysfunction without even realizing it.

There is a time and a place to terminate employees who make choices that are not in the best interests of achieving organizational goals and objectives and advancing organizational agendas, but let’s make sure that, as responsible leaders, we have performed ALL of our due diligence before we arrive at that conclusion.

Check out this article plus more in A-CHIEVE! (July 2011).

When we first read Harvard Business Review’s “The Big Idea: The Age of Hyperspecialization”, the graphic that came to mind was a knowledge worker assembly line – very similar to a manufacturing industry’s production assembly line, but with workers contributing a very narrow slice of intellectual capital (or narrowly defined skill set) based on each person’s area of expertise. For those of you who may not be familiar with the term ‘hyperspecialization’, it is defined as extreme specialization. What exactly does that mean? 

If we were to dissect an employee’s job description, we could typically break down each role into component parts. As an example, let’s dissect the Project Manager’s (PM) role since many organizations are familiar with this job function. Traditionally PMs are chartered with delivering a discrete body of work while attaining timeline, budget, advertised outcome and customer satisfaction targets. Generally speaking, while many PMs excel in building work breakdown structures, assigning activities and tasks to the right subject matter experts and managing their teams to task completion, PMs are also expected, by default, to: 

• Create highly collaborative and engaging team environments
• Manage customer, key stakeholder, executive management, team member and vendor expectations
• Navigate through ambiguity, political landscapes and various other organizational complexities
• Arbitrate team conflicts
• Hold team members accountable to time and cost estimates plus quality outputs
• Develop then execute project management deliverables requiring capabilities such as the following:   

 …all of which are not ‘typical’ PM wheelhouse strengths. To further exacerbate the situation, the PM is additionally responsible for creating the project’s Scope Definition, which is the single most crucial project deliverable because it positions the project for out-of-the-gate success or failure. In today’s tumultuous business climate, unlike years gone by, scope development requires that the PM consider all of the before-mentioned moving parts from a systems thinking/cause and effective relationships perspective plus vet out and wrap in two oftentimes overlooked success criteria: 1) solution usage; and 2) anticipated business value. Whew! Not only is that a lot to take on, but many of the required talents aren’t prevalent within the PM ranks. We know this based on data. Depending on whose survey results you embrace (Forrester Research, Gartner Research, Carnegie Mellon, Standish Group, and the list goes on and on), projects continue to fail at a rate of 30% to 80%, year-over-year, with the 10+ year pattern continuing to fall at the feet of the Project Managers. As Benjamin Franklin would say “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Obviously, the wide swath of expectations that we have layered onto the Project Manager’s role isn’t working and is therefore, ill-conceived as evidenced by the results. It’s time to take a step back and reassess.

With the advent of hyperspecialization, what if organizations were to recalibrate the Project Manager’s role, breaking the work currently performed by one person into more specialized components fulfilled by several people (percents of people, either employees or consultants, whichever approach is more feasible given your particular organization’s talent pool plus construct), with the end goal of leading to organizational improvements in project outcomes – specific to increased quality, speed and value and decreased costs? As an example, for medium to large-scale projects, particularly those projects of strategic importance, what if organizations were to engage a part-time:

• Systems thinking expert
• Business results expert
• Finance/cost accounting expert
• Communications expert
• Human behavior expert  

…as project team members, consolidating ‘experts’ where feasible, meaning, you could find systems thinking, business results and finance/cost accounting expertise all rolled into one credible resource, and even then, only draw upon the resource on a percentage basis. Could the benefits of implementing such an approach offset the costs? If your answer is intuitively “yes”, because you know that your organization is struggling in the project management delivery arena, how would you sell your organization on the hyperspecialization approach? In the case of the Project Manager, it shouldn’t be too difficult to:

Taking hyperspecialization to yet the next level, consider Boeing’s hyperspecialization-on-steroids example, where the world’s largest aerospace company engaged 379 ‘major’ suppliers to build the 787 Dreamliner. While initially hailed as the epitome of subcontracting, the end result proved otherwise, when the parts failed to come together as seamlessly as envisioned, and delays ensued. Other organizations have successfully plunged into the world of hyperspecialization – as both service providers and customers – and are reaping the benefits. TopCoder, a community of 300K freelance developers representing 200 countries, touts Acatel-Lucent, FaceBook, LendingTree and PayPal as customers who tee up ‘competitions’ (identify complex business problems requiring innovative, technology-based, expert solutions), where TopCoder developers openly compete with their colleagues to create the ‘ultimate solution’ in order to win the contest. It’s not unusual for customers to reward competition winners with six or even seven figure payments. Beyond the monetary incentives, the winning developers advance in TopCoder’s highly publicized ‘top contributors’ ratings plus continue to select only those competitions that align with their passions plus areas of specialization. But like the Boeing example, quality control and seamless integration are key when operating in a world of power brokering at the task level. 

For those organizations who want to reap the faster, better, smarter, cheaper benefits of knowledge worker hyperspecialization, the best place to start is a three-pronged approach:

• Select a job that is a competitive advantage enabler; 
• Map both the primary and secondary tasks associated with that particular job; and
• Identify which tasks could be performed with higher quality, at a greater speed, or at a lower cost by a specialized resource(s).

You may find, like the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, that their most highly skilled knowledge workers were spending 20%-40% of their day on data entry, web research, basic spreadsheet analysis and PowerPoint development tasks. Pfizer offloaded these tasks to several specialty firms to optimize their knowledge workers’ capabilities. Or, using the previous Project Manager example, you could find that engaging specialty resources to perform the work that falls outside of the typical PM’s core capabilities, will result in less project failures and increased business value.

Check out this article plus more in A-CHIEVE! (July 2011).

What is ShareVis?

ShareVis is a user friendly point-and-click solution that sits on top of (and integrates with) SharePoint for organizations who are serious about operating Faster, Better, Smarter, Cheaper.

Why ShareVis?

• Automate your most complex business processes in hours vs. weeks and months
• Define successful repeatable steps that deliver consistent positive outcomes vs. reinventing each and every time and hoping for the best 
• Provide easy access to forms and documents that everyone can leverage vs. wasting time searching for and/or recreating documents

• Create pipeline transparency for high-value processes vs. operating in ‘a black hole’ (as an example, it’s a great project pipeline intake, management and delivery solution)
• Establish and measure against targeted outcomes and clear accountabilities vs. manage against subjective, evasive and nebulous expectations   
• Optimize your existing SharePoint investment in a value-add, cost-effective, goal-attainment way vs. sinking more programming code dollars into a hard-to-use base product

• Manage ‘by exception’ through automated alerts and dashboarding vs. trying to manage everything through information overload
• Become self sufficient where business/non technical people can easily create workflows, dashboards, alerts, forms and document management and collaboration communities
• Increase IT”s value proposition by offering a high impact, easy-to-use business solution that is not IT programming dependent

• Significantly reduce your future SharePoint development costs (low/no code)
• Reduce your programming rework expenses as you upgrade to future SharePoint versions
• Take advantage of ShareVis’ ’licensed per server’ vs. ‘licensed per user’ model

Why aren’t more consulting companies advertising ShareVis?

Many consulting/contracting companies are not pushing ShareVis like we are because ShareVis significantly lessens an organization’s reliance on SharePoint developers – which is the ‘bread and butter’ for many consulting/contracting companies. We’re introducing our clients to this product because our goal is to provide our clients with faster, better, cheaper, smarter solutions that materially accelerate business goal attainment. At the conclusion of virtual or on-site ShareVis Training (which we offer), the Business and IT can be 100% productive in ShareVis/SharePoint Day 1. Eric Hutchinson, our SharePoint/ShareVis expert plus certified trainer, is credited with many accomplishments including his recent SharePoint-as-a-business-solution/ShareVis Training roll-out to Kaiser Permanente’s 13 regions/2,600 users.

Who uses ShareVis?

ShareVis’ client list includes American Airlines, Lockheed Martin, Heinz, Sony, Pfizer, US Bank, Fujifilm, The Library of Congress, United States Special Operations Command, Edwards Airforce Base, Elgin Airforce Base plus many more large, mid size plus small businesses across a variety of industries.

Want to learn more about ShareVis?

Please contact us if you’d like to schedule a ShareVis demo plus allow us the opportunity to automate one of your complex business processes so you can experience ShareVis’ easy-to-use and quick-to-implement feature-rich capabilities. Contact us at 440.248.7488. 

UNLEASH CREATIVITY | MOBILIZE TALENT | CAPITALIZE ON COLLECTIVE INTELLLIGENCE

“…while businesses have traditionally managed their workforces with an eye toward operational efficiency, they have not necessarily done so with the creativity, flexibility and speed to capitalize on the growth opportunities that spring from an ever-more dynamic global marketplace.”

Working Beyond Borders, IBM Study, 2010 | Summary Insights from 700 organizations across 61 countries

We thank companies like IBM who have the capital and reach to conduct expansive and thoughtful global surveys and share results with us so we can leverage their work within our own organizational microcosms. Unfortunately, great surveys like “Working Beyond Borders” come and go with little fanfare because we read a title, and in our age of information overload, quickly decide “Oh, that doesn’t apply to me and my organization because:

• We don’t have a global footprint 
• Our industry and culture are unique
• We’re just fine the way we are
• The study is ‘blue sky’ thinking
• IBM is just trying to sell their services”

– when, in fact, the over-arching concepts apply to each and every one of us. Even more ironic, the study’s first of three challenges – cultivating creative leaders – defined as “nimbly leading in complex global environments”, speaks to our inability of being open to then creatively translating (connect-the-dots between) high-level concepts, trends and statistics into goal-driven, realistic and practical strategies and tactics that scream competitive advantage, unique differentiators, exceptional results, continuous improvement and marketplace relevancy. We love studies like IBM’s because we are anecdotally seeing and experiencing within small, mid size and large organizations, exactly what the study’s 707 Chief Human Resource Officers (CHRO) and Workforce Strategists are seeing and experiencing across the globe. So what are the “top 3″ challenges and how can they be remediated?

Challenge #1: Cultivating Creative Leaders

The CHROs concluded that organizations must develop “…energized leaders with a flair for thinking about opportunities and challenges in completely different ways. These leaders must be able to provide direction to, as well as motivate, reward and drive results from an increasingly dispersed and diverse employee base.” We 100% concur with the CHRO’s assessment. Here’s our practical, on-the-ground, living-it-day-in-and-day-out take…creative leaders, as defined above, are not around every corner. In fact, they are few and far between. We believe in the 80/20 rule, so we would suggest that creative leaders account for about 20% of the leadership population. The other 80% typically fall into one of the following categories – the leader:

Has the right creative leader capabilities but…

• Is consumed with ‘in the weeds’ work to a degree where he/she is not contributing as a high performing leader
• His/her creative leadership efforts are being blocked by the person’s manager, who is not a creative leader and therefore, has no appreciation for creative leadership  

Was once a creative leader but…

• Has allowed his/her leadership skills to atrophy for a variety of reasons  
• Is now personally motivated by achieving his/her short-term goals, such as retiring, rather than being concerned about the long-term health and welfare of the organization and its people

Was never a creative leader but was promoted into and continues on in a leadership role because he/she…

• Is a subject matter expert in a particular field, meaning a person who has mastered his/her craft such as a highly skilled technologist, sales person, engineer, lawyer, physician or even a task-completer, but falls short in having mastered the art of amassing followers, breaking through barriers and achieving his/her vision through a sincere, charismatic and transformational style
• Feels ‘locked into’ a management position since stepping down would result in a title, span of control, office location and/or monetary adjustment
• Is self-unaware and doesn’t realize that he/she does not have what it takes to be a creative leader

In each case there is a common theme  – it is up to the most senior leaders to instill, inspire and expect nothing less than creative leadership at all organizational levels. How is the before-mentioned achieved? We suggest that you read our March article, Retaining Pivotal Talent – Your Company’s DNA, and take the first step toward assessing your Creative Leadership talent pool. In a future A-CHIEVE! publication, we’ll dedicate our feature article to how organizations can cultivate creative leaders.   

Challenge #2: Mobilizing Talent

The CHROs concluded that organizations “…must be willing to simplify processes and provide fast, adaptive workforce solutions to meet the requirements of a quickly changing marketplace. A responsive human capital supply chain and the ability to fluidly allocate resources are essential for competitive differentiation in today’s tumultuous environment.” They further stated that while organizations are somewhat to generally adept at sourcing talent, managing labor costs, evaluating workforce performance, enhancing workforce productivity and retaining valued talent, few organizations are proficient in properly and efficiently allocating their workforce, aka mobilizing talent – a capability deemed critical to high performing organizations. In our world, we consistently see this gap. We would also suggest that if an organization isn’t proficient in properly and efficiently allocating their workforce, they are not positioned to optimize their labor costs, workforce performance, workforce productivity and ‘top talent’ retention, since all of these components are tightly coupled from a systems (cause and effect) perspective.

How does an organization tackle workforce allocation? We suggest implementing a highly effective Demand Intake and Fulfillment Management process that is designed to provide customers with positive business outcomes, results and experiences through predefined and transparent workflows and deliverables that optimize time, cost and resource utilization. We guarantee that those organizations who fail to establish some type of predictable and consistent end-end-end supply chain delivery process have little to no value-add visibility into resource utilization and therefore, cannot properly or efficiently allocate their workforce. It’s simply not possible.   

Challenge #3: Capitalizing on Collective Intelligence

The CHROs concluded that “…application of collective organizational knowledge and experience is essential to building an agile and responsive workforce…yet many organizations lack the structure and resources to facilitate institutional knowledge sharing and collaboration.”

We hold a very different perspective based on our experiences. While we whole-heartedly agree that the gap is real and pervasive, we believe that while a lack of structure and facilitative resources is a contributing factor, the root cause can be traced to leaders and teams lacking the attitude, know-how and skills required to behave in a truly collaborative manner. The cold, harsh truth – if a person isn’t collaborative, he/she will only share knowledge if it benefits the individual vs. the organization. During our Collaboration in Action workshops, we discuss this very topic – why aren’t human beings inherently collaborative? We would suggest that as a species, human beings are wired to be competitive and self-preserving (the survival of the fittest), which doesn’t help. To make matters worse, educational institutions focus on  individual performance starting Day 1, when we take our first step into the classroom. Although team activities and sports are thrown into the mix here and there, we are generally evaluated based on individual vs. team performance. We then enter the workplace and find ourselves in highly competitive environments where individual performance is king, managing upward to appear collaborative is possible, our leaders aren’t setting the right collaborative tone, our organization’s culture is anything but collaborative, and we rarely receive the essential tools required to break our bad, non collaborative habits. The good news – collaborative behaviors can be learned and then instilled and sustained through awareness-building, consistent practice and accountability methods and measures.

Want to take a deeper dive into the “top 3″ trends? Download IBM’s Working Beyond Borders Study.

Check out this article plus more in A-CHIEVE! (May 2011).

Part 1: The SharePoint Matchmaker, You Are 

One of the most common questions I’m asked from IT and business leaders alike is how do they make the case for SharePoint in their organization? Most people who use SharePoint understand its potential to solve common business problems. But they have difficulty communicating the real value of SharePoint to the executives in their company making the budget decisions.

So where do you start? You begin by becoming a SharePoint Matchmaker. Don’t like the new role? How about Business Analyst? A SharePoint Matchmaker is essentially a business analyst focused on the business and technology of SharePoint. If you happen to be a business analyst already then this is going to be fun! (No, really – fun!)

What or whom are you matching? You are matching whatever it is that is of #1 importance to the key decision makers and influencers in your company, e.g., your most vocal internal customers…your just-make-it-happen CEO…your ever-vigilant CFO…and your deliver-faster-better-cheaper boss, with a SharePoint solution that helps him or her or them attain their business goals. The key to selling your matchmaking idea is to first discover then clearly articulate (in Business English — not tech talk) how your SharePoint solution will either fulfill an unmet business need or eliminate a business pain point or, if you’re incredibly innovative, achieve both simultaneously! Identify that sweet spot where need or pain meets effective business solution and watch the SharePoint romance unfold!        

What fuels the SharePoint attraction? If your company is like many others and is trying to do more with less, then SharePoint 2010 has many features that will help you make the case for SharePoint. For example, a common organizational goal, particularly in this economy, is keeping headcounts flat. Or maybe you’re now managing more relationships with vendors, clients, partners, etc. than you used to, so you need a simple yet effective way to keep track of relational expectations, commitments and results. There are many ways SharePoint can not only make your job, your boss’, your team’s and the C-level Suite’s jobs easier, but SharePoint can save your organization time and money. I’ll delve into how SharePoint can save your company big bucks and how you make the SharePoint Return on Investment (ROI) pitch to your CFO in the next part of our 3-part series, “Show Me the Savings”.

Back to matchmaking…the following breaks down a few examples of business objectives and their corresponding SharePoint solutions. Use this as your ‘getting started’ guide to determine which components of SharePoint 2010 will support your company’s business objectives.

In part two of our 3-part SharePoint love story, “Show Me the Savings,” I’ll break down both the hard and soft ROI that you’ll need in your role as matchmaker to secure buy-in!

When was the last time you took a hard look at not only your rock star performers, but also those leaders and team members who are serving in über pivotal roles that could either create or destroy your value proposition? If your answer is any one (or combination of) the following:

• I can’t remember.
• What’s the big deal!
• I don’t have time for that.
• This economy is so bad, no one can find a job.
• My team loves me – no one would ever leave – and if they did, I’d just replace them.
• As long as we keep the guys and gals on the front line happy, since they interact with our customers, we don’t have to worry about anyone else behind the scenes.
• Let Joe the guy who is reporting to me, worry about that!
• So, I’ll just hire someone else if ultra-talented, amazingly gifted, highly artistic Becky quits because she’s got that ‘artists’ temperament thing about her, so the heck with her!

…stop and reassess.

Did you know that productivity decreased by almost 2% in the 2Q2010 before rebounding in 3Q2010 and even with high unemployment, voluntary turnover is rising? After falling 1.4 million from its November 2006 peak to its September 2009 trough, the number of voluntary quits rose by 326,000 between September 2009 and September 2010. (Bureau of Labor Statistics, November 9, 2010). Are these statistics telling us that employees might be reaching their limits and starting to seek out new opportunities? And if yes, do we really believe that our rock stars and pivotal people – who truly define our company’s DNA – are exempt from these statistics? The answer is a resounding “No!”

OK, now what? The first place to start is by defining your ‘value chain’ via ’value chain mapping.’ The term itself was first popularized by Michael Porter in his 1985 best-seller Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance, and was used in the context of analyzing physical assets in production environments. The model was later adapted to accommodate intangible assets and service organizations. The goal is to zero in on those factors that influence your customers in their decision to choose your team’s offerings. You might actually be surprised with the results because some factors may be intuitively obvious while others are not – especially when it comes to behind-the-scenes factors! As an example, one might conclude that the most pivotal people in a medical practice are those that provide front line service to patients, e.g., the receptionist, nurses, physicians. But what about the back room tech guy, Lou, sitting in a 4-sided cube in a non descript data center miles away, who is the only person on staff who knows the ins and outs of the Electronic Management Records (EMR) system that the physician is 100% reliant upon to provide an accurate and complete patient medical history in order to render a precise diagnosis plus appropriate course of action? Can you imagine the negative ramifications (including death) if Lou, being highly talented but disengaged, failed to notice or didn’t act on an early morning error message informing him that the Allergy and Immunology software module wasn’t properly ‘technologically linked’ to the EMR, and later that day the physician wrote a prescription for Patient X, not realizing that the patient would suffer a severe allergic reaction?

Yes, Lou would be considered pivotal. The next question becomes, what are you proactively doing to not only identify folks like Lou, but also assess their level of engagement plus a strategy?

We recommend the following steps:

Step 1: Identify your value chain(s)

Step 2: Identify and assess those pivotal team members who belong to the value chain(s):

Step 3: Assess then segment Step 2′s pivotal team members into the following performance categories:

Step 4: Assess each pivotal team members’ level of engagement:

Note: with Steps 2, 3 and 4, assign a simple rating system that will help you determine where to focus first as you proceed with Step 5. As an example, if Jenny is Moderately Pivotal, High Maintenance and Actively Disengaged, your leadership time would, most likely, be best spent identifying a ‘Jenny Succession Plan’ coupled with a ‘Jenny Exit Strategy’ vs. investing time in trying to move Jenny out of her High Maintenance and Actively Disengaged zones.  

Step 5: Create a Pivotal Talent Engagement Strategy which can differ by industry and company and will certainly differ by person. This is certainly the most time intensive step, but the payback can be HUGE and the risk of not taking steps to identify, assess and address your pivotal people can also be HUGE. Your strategy will include elements such as (using Lou as the example):

Once you’ve created and have begun executing your Pivotal Talent Engagement Strategy, you’ll need to regularly assess your strategy’s effectiveness at an individual level. If you have constructed your Culture of Accountability, the assessment piece is not ‘in addition to’ what you’re already doing as a high performing leader.

If you’d like to receive more information regarding how to identify, assess and retain Pivotal Talent, just let us know!

Check out this article plus more in A-CHIEVE! (April 2011).

“High performing organizations (HPOs) use information to help people improve by giving people abundant, timely and helpful data about their performance on a regular basis, individually and as a group.” (Harvard Business Review)

We would ask you to consider amending the author’s statement by suggesting that, as leaders, we focus not only on helping our people improve, but helping them optimize their potential. But how does one realistically go about doing that in our running-to-the-next-fire, never-having-the-time-to-take-a-breath, pressure induced leadership lives? The answer – create a Culture of Accountability. Embarking upon this mission certainly takes a bit of strategizing, planning, defining and implementing, but once you start working the puzzle, creating momentum and declaring incremental successes, the inertia becomes self-perpetuating and each building block becomes self-sustaining.

This begs the question…how does one construct a Culture of Accountability? We would suggest the following 12 Critical Steps and have provided a brief explanation of each:

#1: Lead by example

You must demonstrate that you’re accountable to all aspects of exceptional leadership, not just those aspects that are the most desirable to you or that you’re most comfortable with. The sign of a true leader is how you conduct yourself during stressful or difficult situations. If you fight, flee or avoid vs. constructively tackle your responsibilities head on, you will lose your credibility with your customers, colleagues and team. If you fail to hold yourself accountable (which includes you holding your team accountable), you will only get so far in creating a Culture of Accountability. It’s that simple.

#2: Invest the time required

“For anything worth having one must pay the price; and the price is always work, patience, love, self-sacrifice…” (John Burroughs, Essayist) Mr. Burroughs eloquently captured the essence of this step. Enough said.    

#3: Engage your team in architecting and executing your Accountability Strategy

There is no better way to build accountability commitment than to actively engage your team in architecting then executing your Accountability Strategy. Referring back to February’s A-CHIEVE! edition, leaders are more likely to attain their goals when they create a condition where their employees feel that they’re a part of the team, feel that they’re respected and valued and feel that they’re learning and growing. Include them.    

#4: Know what your customers expect

While this concept may seem intuitively obvious to most, it is still elusive to some. We frequently encounter one of three scenarios: 1) teams confuse ‘managing customer expectations’ with ‘making customers happy’; 2) teams are more concerned about their needs vs. their customers’ needs; and 3) teams erroneously project their own needs onto their customers and fail to discover what’s really important to their customers. Find out if your team truly knows what your clients expect. Never assume.

#5: Translate your customers’ expectations into well-defined products/deliverables, services and processes

This isn’t as tricky as it might sound if approached in bite-size pieces. The first place to start is by identifying then defining a handful of key products/deliverables, services and processes that are most critical to your team’s success – as seen through your customers’ eyes. By virtue of identifying the tangibles and processes that enable or yield consistent, positive outcomes or results, you can now establish clear, objective, performance-based expectations. Our best advice here – start simple – don’t boil the ocean.

#6: Establish meaningful product/deliverable, service and process performance targets/measures

The most common mistake we see is that organizations tend to go ‘measurement crazy’ – too many, not the right ones, difficult to track/collect, easy to game, you-name-it – or we see the reverse – nothing can be (or is being) measured. The best way to establish meaningful performance targets is to walk in your customers’ shoes. If the performance target isn’t truly meaningful to your customer, ask yourself “Why are we measuring this – what’s the business value?” If you can legitimately answer that question, great, and if not, don’t measure it.          

#7: Assign the work to those who have the right skills

We totally get it…sometimes you must deal with the cards that you’ve been dealt, and you may not have the right members on your team. The question becomes:

Today you may not have the right talent on your team, but it’s your leadership responsibility to change that. 

#8: Equip your team with the tools to be successful

‘Tools’ covers a broad spectrum and although we’re not a technology software firm, we frequently recommend Microsoft’s SharePoint software to those clients who are intent on creating a Culture of Accountability. The product suite includes value-add features that translate into ‘accountability techniques’, e.g., process workflows and automated forms, alert notifications, built-in service levels and performance dashboards. We’re also a huge fan of ‘managing by exception’ (vs. managing everything) and this tool supports our leadership philosophy. Having specifically designed SharePoint solutions tailored to ‘holding teams accountable’, we ALWAYS recommend that our clients ‘start simple’ when choosing this path. Don’t get overly complex.    

#9: Evaluate the evidence

If you have followed Steps 1-8, you’ll arrive at Step 9 in a great place, meaning, you’ll have the data you need at your fingertips so you can accurately, effectively and objectively evaluate your team. You will be in a position of ‘knowing with certainty’ vs. relying on ‘gut feel’ and others’ perceptions. This is especially important for those of you who have team members who believe that their performance is ‘off the charts’ when it really isn’t. Don’t take anyone’s word for how performance-effective your team members are or aren’t. Let the evidence (data) speak for itself.      

#10: Hold your team accountable

Now that you have the performance evidence, engage in constructive dialogue with your team members throughout the course of the year – not just during 6 and 12-month performance review windows. For those team members that are meeting or exceeding performance targets, look for ways to reward them through professional development and growth venues. Help them achieve their true potential. For those team members that are falling below their targets, find out why and help them move the performance pendulum in the right direction or help them find a ‘right fit’ role within your organization or help them with their exit strategy. The greatest gift you can give to your team members is the gift of honesty. 

#11: Celebrate Successes

For those of you who avoid celebrating successes because you personally don’t need a “thank you for a job well done”,  remember that all people are not created equal in this regard. You will have some team members who quickly move on to the next goal…some who thrive on a simple “thank you”…and some who are counting the days between now and the celebratory party. Remember – this isn’t about you – this is about your team and their needs. Thank them and go celebrate!

#12: Embrace Continuous Improvement

The best way to create a Culture of Accountability is to introduce thoughtful change at a realistic pace . Start simple, gain traction, demonstrate a few wins, then keep on going! The goal is not to take on too much too soon, unintentionally creating chaos, then discover 3-6 months down the road that your team is overwhelmed and has become paralyzed and the great work that you started comes to a screeching halt. “Slow and steady wins the race.” (Aesop, Fabulist)

If you’d like to receive more information regarding how to build a Culture of Accountability including how to leverage our SharePoint Jump-Start© Accountability Program, just let us know!

Check out this article plus more in A-CHIEVE! (April 2011).

In A-CHIEVE! (February 2011), we featured the Disengagement Epidemic impacting 33% of the U.S. workforce (25 million employees) at an annual lost productivity cost of $416 billion. We also shared how to keep your employees engaged – through “human connectedness” create an environment where your employees feel that they’re a part of the team, feel that they’re respected and valued and feel that they’re learning and growing. Enter Team-Based Learning (TBL), which, when structured correctly, not only engages your workforce, but accelerates business goal attainment, solves a multitude of challenges plus delivers high impact results!

How did TBL come about?

The term was first popularized by Larry Michaelsen, University of Oklahoma, to describe an educational strategy applied in the academic environment. That application, however, is different than what we’re recommending in this context. In 2005, the term was redefined then adopted by Duke Corporate Education’s President and PricewaterhouseCooper’s Chief Learning Officer to describe a process for teaching and developing people in the workplace vs. in the classroom. Their goal was to replicate John Hopkins’ hospital learning environment methods into the corporate world. They recognized the effectiveness of teaching medicine to and engaging interns and residents in the treatment of real patients with real diseases in order to develop highly effective doctors.

How does TBL apply to the corporate world?

Let’s take a look at how TBL works. At a high-level:

• The team develops its people and practices while pursuing meaningful, measurable business goals
• Learning activities and stretch assignments provide benefits that motivate the team to engage and commit
• Development principles and routines are embedded into day-to-day work processes
• Team members continuously learn, develop and professional evolve
• Every team member participates on a consistent basis and is held accountable – no one is exempt

Can TBL be that powerful?

Absolutely! Successfully structured TBL environments deliver many benefits while mitigating some of the more common place, organizational impediments. TBL organizations:

Realize…

• Active employee engagement
• Goal-oriented thinking, behaviors and outcomes
• Real-world, real-time, targeted ideas and solutions invention and implementation
• Collaborative cultures and shared accountabilities
• Training and professional development investment optimization

Mitigate…

• Employee disengagement
• ‘Check off the task’ thinking and behaviors
• Theoretical, conceptual and philosophical talk with no plan of action/no results
• Silos, we/they thinking, lone ranger behaviors and competing, conflicting or no accountabilities
• Miss-spent resources (training dollars and people time) plus disenfranchised employees in the absence of an ‘applied learning’ plan or approach

How does one go about implementing TBL?

If TBL is new to you, start simple and try the following:

• Identify a measurable business goal
• Define your success criteria, e.g., the outcome will be perceived as wildly successful when the following is achieved…
• Discuss your vision, business goal and success criteria with your team
• Engage your team in defining your goal-attainment strategy, objectives, scope, risks and mitigations, roles and responsibilities, deliverables, timeline, plan, etc.

At this stage, take a step back and identify all team experience, knowledge, capability and skill (hard/soft) needs and gaps that could either accelerate or jeopardize a successful outcome. As a team, specifically discuss and identify:

• How and when you can inject/interweave practical, bite-size learning segments into your work so you may simultaneously develop your team while accelerating results delivery
• Who is best qualified to address your team’s learning needs. By ‘best qualified’, we suggest you seek out resources who are TBL principles-experienced, so they can help you:

1. Identify ‘on the fly’ opportunities as valuable contexts for learning
2. Push responsibility combined with support to the most junior person possible
3. Teach vs. tell – use inquiry to teach rather than just give the answer or solve the issue
4. Create a heightened sense of accountability and motivation for team members in delivering quality client service
5. Effectively embed TBL daily routines into your work, e.g.,  rounds, shadowing, team lunch & learns and workshops,  individual and group observation & feedback, lessons learned forums

How have TechEdge clients successfully piloted TBL while pursuing measurable business goals?

While…

• Identifying, vetting and prioritizing enterprise-wide business opportunities and needs with the greatest payback potential
• Optimizing throughput as measured by cost, speed, accuracy, outcomes plus customer experience
• Achieving Key Performance Targets through best practice methods, tools and techniques adoption
• Increasing customer satisfaction survey scores as measured by service delivery process predictability, speed, efficiency, communication plus service delivery outcomes

If you’d like to receive more information regarding how to implement Team-Based Learning in order to engage your workforce, accelerate business goal attainment, solve a multitude of challenges plus derive high impact results, please contact your TechEdge Team! 

Check out this article plus more in A-CHIEVE! (March 2011).

How many of you in Achiever-land are finding yourselves in a situation where you’re frustrated, stressed out and/or unfulfilled in your job because every time you turn around it seems that every work assignment that heads your way is characterized as a “#1, this is more important than everything else, drop-dead emergency”? Well, join the rest of your fellow Achievers (approximately 20% of the workforce) who are experiencing the same!  

Unfortunately, once you’ve been tagged as ‘the go to person’, which is typically a person who knows how to get things accomplished in a timely, cost effective and quality manner, your name spreads like wild fire. The good news is…you’ve earned a great reputation…so take a bow! The not as good news…you’ve got a real dilemma on your hands because demand (the onslaught of work that continues to head your way) far exceeds supply (your available capacity which, by the way, shouldn’t include your much deserved downtime.) This situation is further exasperated because Achievers are wired to not let anything fall through the cracks. As more work piles on, even Achievers can enter the ranks of the officially ‘disengaged’ (refer to The Disengagement Epidemic). So what do you do?

This type of scenario has many tentacles, which translates to – there’s no ‘silver bullet’ solution. We can, however, identify the ‘usual suspects’ or ‘heavy hitters’, aka the contributing factors, that create Achiever workload havoc (which, over time, will lead to Achiever burnout plus disillusionment):

Although the above naming conventions might appear to be ominous to some, the processes and systems can be built in an easy-to-manage way, and actually, that’s preferred. Make it as simple as possible and folks will be more inclined to use the tools and techniques. Make it complex and people will look for every excuse to circumvent the methods.

Why consider implementing (or improving upon) the above processes and systems? In my world, my business savvy clients are always looking for ways to increase their bottom line, deliver exceptional customer service, optimize their resources and cater to their Achievers because they’re the A Team – the ‘cream of the crop’ – and beyond that, for all that Achievers are willing to give to organizations and teams in terms of their blood, sweat and tears (and results!), they deserve the very best in return from their leadership.

How Engaged are You, Your Team and Your Organization?

Did you know that we’re in the midst of a Disengagement Epidemic? According to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ 2010 data, 33% of the workforce is highly disengaged as compared to 20% in 2008 and 10% pre 2008. And they’re not the only ones presenting alarming statistics. Gallup 2010 reports that 33% of employees in world-class organizations are either not engaged or actively disengaged and 67% of employees in average organizations are either not engaged or actively disengaged – which equates to a 1.83:1 ratio of disengaged to engaged employees. Gallup further reports that “more than 25 million people are actively disengaged with their jobs and workplace at a cost to U.S. employers of $416 billion in lost productivity.” But the picture is even worse than that. Gallup 2010 research statistics show that organizations comprised of not engaged or actively disengaged employees additionally experience the following:

What does the epidemic look like at the employee level? According to the Society for Human Resource Management, non engaged employees:

 Actively disengaged employees:

If you’re in a formal leadership role, the question of the day becomes “How do you keep your team members engaged?” The “net/net” answer…you must genuinely create mutually beneficial relationships that embrace sharing, belonging and professional intimacy (aka “human connectedness”) between and among you and your team members where your employees feel that they’re a part of the team, feel that they’re respected and valued, and feel that they’re learning and growing. What does “human connectedness” look like? Your employees: 

But what if you’re not serving in a formal leadership role – what then? If you’re an informal leader, you can increase your and your team’s engagement by strengthening your own “human connectedness” capabilities. Where do you start? We recommend the following, which, by the way, mirror collaborative behaviors:

If you’d like to receive more information regarding how to assess employee engagement, develop “human connectedness” and instill a sustainable collaborative culture that positions you, your team and your organization for success, just let us know!

Check out this article plus more in A-CHIEVE! (February 2011).