Let’s be honest. What this post is really about is what blogs this leadership blog writer reads, simply because they may be of benefit to you.
Like you, I skim read a number of blogs and newsletters. But there are only three writers who consistently offer me compelling reading.
For frontline managers and executives, performance is fairly straightforward. Good judgement, strategic skills, creating something new, tactical skills, and personal drive dominate it according to “The Leadership Machine” authors Michael Lombardo and Robert Eichinger.
Promotion is another matter entirely. While it has a strong ‘getting work out’ element, relationships, networking and learning agility largely determines who gets ahead.
What’s really interesting is what gets frontline managers and executives fired.
There’s an easy way for you to practically apply the Dead Man’s Test.
You’ll remember the Dead Man’s Test from last week’s post “What Dead Men can Teach You about Frontline Leadership”. It’s simply a way of helping you decide if something is a behaviour. If a dead man can do it perfectly, it’s not a behaviour and it won’t help you create a successful outcome.
The easy way to pass the test is to avoid saying ‘don’t’. Or to put it another way, don’t say don’t.
It’s quite amazing what dead men don’t do.
Dead men don’t complain or insult customers; and they don’t drink and drive or speed. Dead men don’t leave the toilet seat up or leave their clothes lying on the floor; and they don’t walk on the grass or pee in the pool. Dead men don’t make errors or have accidents; and they don’t prepare incomplete reports or leave their work stations.
But dead men can teach you something about frontline leadership.
Your expectations of people and their expectations of themselves are key factors in how well people perform at work. Known as the Pygmalion Effect, the power of expectations cannot be overestimated.
The Pygmalion Effect has its roots in ancient Greek mythology. Pygmalion, a Greek sculptor, carved a statue of an ideal woman and then fell in love with his creation. Eventually Venus, the goddess of love, transformed the statue into a living woman. Thus, Pygmalion’s belief in love helped him experience the real thing. The Pygmalion Effect is therefore a form of self-fulfilling prophecy.
In the business world, the Pygmalion Effect refers to the impact of one person’s positive expectations on another. You can summarise it as follows:
In two recent posts I’ve discussed the discovery that the most powerful motivator at work is the positive attention provided by a person’s immediate manager. If you missed those posts, you can find out more at these links: ‘How to Motivate People’ and ‘The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us’.
This discovery, amongst other things, prompted the Corporate Leadership Council to observe that, “The most effective drivers of employee performance are often underemphasised, even excluded, from ‘performance management’ as it is traditionally defined.”
When it comes to maximising employee motivation and performance, frontline managers matter much more than senior leaders. And the reason is as old as the history of human kind.
If you’re interested in dramatically improving employee motivation and performance, then you’ll be interested in Daniel Pink’s latest book, “Drive – The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.” An excellent overview of its key messages can be found in this short animated video – possibly one of the most innovative and interesting videos you’ll find on YouTube.
The key discoveries that Pink highlights are the outcomes of incentivising performance, along the lines taken by many organisations in their motivation schemes. He reports that research shows for purely mechanical skills, the higher the pay the higher performance. However for tasks that require cognitive skill, the larger the reward the poorer the performance.
In the modern western world the cult of work has become highly valued. Its most recent incarnation is the ‘always on’ culture. Being available via mobile and email, if not 24/7, then at least more hours each day than was acceptable a decade ago.
Of course it feels good to be busy, to submit to the siren call of activity. Yet there is no special virtue in hard work. The value is in the outcomes, or results, of that work. Activity by itself is pointless. Activity is simply a means to an end.
Too frequently in organisations, accountabilities are described in ways that aren’t results-oriented. They are described in terms of activities to be undertaken rather than the results to be accomplished. But there is a critical difference: activities are what go on during the course of the day, while results are the completed work that is left behind when your people go home.
The great military and political leader of France, Napoleon Bonaparte, was quoted as saying, “A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of coloured ribbon.”
In more recent times, the Corporate Leadership Council identified that fair and accurate informal positive feedback from a knowledgeable source (such as a person’s immediate manager) is the single most effective performance management lever available.
A recent McKinsey & Company research study, titled, “Motivating people: Getting beyond money”, has found what Bonaparte and the Corporate Leadership Council discovered to be true still holds water. That positive leadership attention, along with praise and commendation from a person’s immediate manager, are the most effective motivators available in any organisation. In fact, McKinsey has found that they outperform financial incentives.
Why should you focus on feedforward rather than feedback?
In last week’s post, “What’s the Difference between Feedback and Feedforward”, I noted that discussions that are mostly past focussed feel more like an interrogation that creates defensiveness. On the other hand, discussions that are mostly future focussed feel like a supportive coaching discussion that emphasises problem solving and creates opportunities. Consequently, in many situations you face day-to-day, feedforward makes much more sense than feedback.
Here are my top five reasons for using feedforward: