No doubt you pay attention to a range of numbers in your organisation. With frequent and detailed reporting, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that in the end one key number is important.
That number might be profit per transaction, or profit per employee. However, as an end product it’s of more use to the head of your business unit than it is to frontline leaders.
From a leadership perspective, you’ll find that a focus on one seemingly less important result can have the flow-on effect of dramatically improving the important numbers.
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Discretionary effort is voluntary effort. It is the level of effort over and above that required for an employee to simply get by and keep their job.
There is often a difference between how well people perform and how well they are capable of performing. Leading in a way which enables you to motivate employees to contribute their discretionary effort, enables you to capture the prize of high employee engagement and improved performance.
Discretionary effort is the true discriminator between leadership and compulsion. In most organisations it is expected, yet in the absence of leadership, discretionary effort does not occur as frequently as desired. Instead what people often put up with is management by nagging. Policies and procedures abound, yet don’t produce the desired response. So the usual reaction is to repeat what’s been said a little longer, louder and meaner.
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Modern western society is all about speed. You want it fast. You want it now. From business book summaries you can read in 10 minutes, to food in a minute for dinner. You don’t want to hang around.
So to save time, let’s cut to the essence of Effective Leadership. In the end there are only three essential practices of Effective Leadership. Without you taking action on these bad boys, you’ll find it difficult to motivate staff and your team will be going nowhere.
- Be clear about the results you want from your people (by identifying, measuring and communicating those key results).
- Be clear about the behaviours that create those results (by specifying and communicating the critical behaviours that lead to the outcomes or results you want).
- Manage people on their behaviour by reinforcing critical behaviours so they occur consistently. When necessary, provide corrective feedback to improve off-target behaviours.
If you have a need for speed, we’ve covered the essentials and you can get back to work. But if you have a need for a little more information, read on.
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You’ll probably agree that dealing with conflict in the workplace can be a difficult and delicate matter. Which suggests that conflict might be a bad thing. But that’s not necessarily the case.
An example of the advantages of conflict can be found in Jim Collins’ book “Good to Great”. In a discussion on Nucor (one of the ‘good to great’ companies studied), there is a passing reference to deliberately generating conflict in frontline teams:
“The Nucor system did not aim to turn lazy people into hard workers, but to create an environment where hardworking people would thrive and lazy workers would either jump or get thrown right off the bus. In one extreme case, workers chased a lazy teammate right out of the plant with an angle iron.”
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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.
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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.
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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 Effective 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.
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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 Effective Leadership.
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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:
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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, first- level and mid-level managers matter much more than senior leaders. And the reason is as old as the history of human kind.
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