Thus far, you’ve journeyed through two key steps for fixing, building, or stretching your organization: You’ve taken a fresh look at the significance of finding and keeping the right people, and you have become more aware of the importance of the environment in which they work. Now it’s time to roll up your sleeves and develop the human capital in your charge. Talent rarely arrives fully developed, and one of a leader’s greatest responsibilities is to take the human capital he or she is entrusted with and make it more valuable tomorrow than it is today. Thus, creating and committing to a process of training, coaching, mentoring, and differentiating your people is the next discipline you must incorporate into your leadership repertoire. In this chapter I’ll present strategies for accomplishing these ends as well as outlining how to accelerate the growth of your best people with effective delegation and how to deliver the fast, brutally honest feedback they need to grow.
Developing people starts with the right mind-set from the leadership in an organization. To judge from the number of companies who poorly or inconsistently develop their people, this mind-set needs urgent attention. Many managers don’t invest the time or money necessary to develop their teams because they see training as an expense rather than an investment. Instead, they act as though time and experience alone will improve their people. On the contrary, the wrong experiences can make people worse, not better. Experience can be helpful when optimizing but not when innovating, because it’s difficult for people to discover new lands using the same old map. Managers use excuses that training is difficult to quantify and that people serious about their careers should be willing to invest in themselves. These are cop-outs. Often, managers with this dinosaur mind-set were never trained, coached, or mentored themselves so they don’t appreciate or value the developmental process.
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If you don’t invest time and money in good people, you don’t deserve them. In fact, you deserve to lose them, and probably will. It’s just a matter of time.
To develop human capital you must focus less on the cost of training your people and more on what it costs to neglect it. Yes, training is expensive. It takes plenty of time and money. But if you ever get hung up on the cost of training your people, consider the cost of their ignorance. Think about it: What does it cost to have a receptionist who can’t handle calls with courtesy and efficiency? What’s it cost to have a salesperson who can’t greet a customer without offending him or her, who can’t close a deal, overcome an objection, set an appointment, or ask for a referral? Here’s one that will keep you up at night: What’s the financial penalty when you have a manager who is ignorant of how to motivate or interview, who cannot create and cast a compelling vision or turn around a poor performer?
When managers do train their people, it’s often ineffective. There’s a substantial gap between training people and training them effectively. To grasp the difference, imagine a group of shopping-mall security guards battling a group of Navy Seals, or Barney Fife fighting Rambo, and you’ll understand the difference between someone who is trained and one who is trained effectively.
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There is one thing worse than training people and having them leave your organization: It’s not training them and having them stay!
As you examine your strategy to train and develop your people, consider incorporating the factors discussed in the next section into your regimen.
In my travels I get the opportunity to attend numerous training meetings, and one thing many have in common is that they are not real training meetings—they are educating meetings. Training meetings get people involved. Attendees are writing information down, practicing presentations or other job functions; salespeople are role-playing scripts. Educating meetings, on the other hand, are styled such that an instructor is presenting information—usually too much and with a boring delivery—and those in attendance are merely spectators, staring back, eyes glazed over, mentally disengaged from what is going on. If the attendees aren’t doing most of the work in your training meetings, they aren’t nearly as effective as they should be. To fully appreciate the difference between training and educating, consider the following. If your kids came home from school and told you they were taking sex education classes, you’d probably be okay with that. But if they walked in one day and mentioned they were going through sexual training, you’d have a totally different reaction! Think about your training meetings: Are people involved, and are their senses engaged in what’s going on? People learn and retain better when they are involved, hands-on, and taking action. As Mark Twain declared, “Anyone who carries a cat home by the tail will learn a lot more about cats than someone who merely watches a cat.”
Training and managing are two different skill sets. As important as training is, few companies train their trainers to train. Chances are, you are involved with some type of training in your current job. It may encompass one-on-one instruction or classroom-style presenting.
To improve your own speaking skills read David People’s book Presentations Plus (John Wiley & Sons, 1992). This book is a must-read for everyone holding any sort of presentation or training meeting. If you want to improve your presentations, buy this book. It’s a fun, fast read that will build your confidence.
Keep in mind that your purpose in conducting a training session or meeting of any genre is to relate and not to proclaim. Don’t become so enamored with the sound of your own voice that you pontificate when you should be connecting, influencing, and teaching.
One of the most neglected aspects of any training program is a focus on consistently training the managers. There are training meetings for new hires and sales training meetings, but rarely do top leadership teams get together to learn together. On the other hand, management meetings are common, often too common. These are gatherings at which leaders discuss budgets, ad strategies, and forecasts. Management meetings are important to control the technical aspects of an organization, but only management training meetings deliberately develop the leadership capacities of your managers. Management training meetings can center on discussing strategies for motivating employees or turning around poor performers. They cover interview and recruiting techniques, effective leadership styles, strategic thinking exercises, and more. Books, videos, and audio resources on pertinent topics are helpful to guide and facilitate these meetings. When you think about it, what could be a better use of your time than getting together to grow the people charged with growing your business?
If you’re serious about getting better performances from your people and developing them to their fullest potential, you must deliver feedback on their performance quickly, honestly, and consistently. People can’t grow when they live in a gray area. Good coaches understand the importance of feedback. In fact, perhaps the best definition of coaching is the combined acts of observing, analyzing performance, and delivering fast feedback. The best coaches are leaders who lead from the front. They spend enough time in the trenches to discern what is really going on and offer meaningful feedback on performance. The alternative is to be locked in your office atop the ivory tower and rely on intuition or secondhand information to make judgments and espouse advice. Remote-control leaders who spend more time with things than with people are the least effective managers. They haven’t the credibility or the insight to help others grow. Thus, if you are going to develop people, you’re going to have to actually spend time with them. I’ve seen leaders who can impress others at a distance, but only those who get up close can affect people.
Positive feedback is a form of positive reinforcement. Positive reinforcement is like oxygen. It’s the tool of choice for leaders wanting to improve the behaviors that will improve results. Psychologists tell us that behaviors that get reinforced get repeated. Thus, if someone is doing the right thing, makes a good decision, or engages in useful action, the leader had better reinforce it if he or she wants to see more of it. I’ve heard my share of old-school managers asking why they should reinforce or compliment someone for doing something they’re getting paid to do in the first place. This Neanderthal attitude displays a glaring ignorance of how human nature works. In fact, by failing to reinforce worthy performances you can extinguish them.
The key to positive reinforcement is to deliver it quickly, because delayed consequences lose their punch. Again, this is why leaders who stay engaged at the front lines of their business are better coaches, since you must be proximate to reinforce—and especially to reinforce quickly. Think about the trainer who gives the porpoise a fish for completing a jump through the flaming hoop: When does he give the reward? Immediately! He doesn’t wait a week, a day, or an hour. Such delayed approaches would be impotent in trying to develop the habit of jumping through the hoop on command. The problem is that most managers seem to know more about training mammals than about getting better behavior out of their people. Think about how quickly you and your organization give positive reinforcement. For instance, getting a paycheck or bonus is a form of positive reinforcement. It brings closure to work well done and allows the employee to focus on the next matter at hand. Bearing this in mind, how timely is your delivery of this type of positive reinforcement? The same goes for acknowledgment of having a great day, week, or month. If you take these accomplishments for granted you’re sending the wrong message to your workforce and will eliminate the productive behaviors you want. People’s performance will be uninspired and results will be inconsistent. Don’t worry about overdoing positive reinforcement. I’ve never heard anyone tell a manager, “You know, boss, the problem with you is that you reinforce me too much.” The key is to reinforce the right behaviors. People must deserve it; otherwise it won’t mean anything when they get it.
Another key aspect of positive reinforcement is that it is always in the eyes of the receiver, not the giver. In other words, it must mean something to the person getting it or it’s ineffective. If the porpoise jumps through the hoop and its trainer offers it a carrot, it probably won’t be as inclined to jump through again. If what you are using as positive reinforcement doesn’t cause a behavior to be repeated, it is not effective. Change your approach. Don’t wait for the performer to adapt to your efforts.
Another benefit of positive reinforcement is that it’s contagious. When a leader creates a culture where people are publicly and quickly championed for good performance, he or she starts a chain reaction and establishes a value that followers will emulate. Reinforced people reinforce other people.
If behaviors that are reinforced and rewarded are repeated, consider this: If someone is doing a poor job and you don’t confront it, aren’t you in effect reinforcing it? You bet you are. This is how managers unwittingly encourage and breed poor performances. Since they never address them, they in effect endorse them and can expect to see more of them. And you really can’t fault the poor performer, who is only behaving in a way that’s been reinforced in the past. Thus, when coaching people for better behaviors and results it is just as important to confront poor performances quickly as it is to reinforce good ones quickly. This takes constant attention but is an essential part of a leader’s job. Personally, I’m not going to let someone have eight bad days in a row before we sit down and talk about it. Eight bad hours is stretching it. On the other hand, I can’t afford to let my best players have victory after victory without getting in there and letting them hear about how well they’re doing. This affirmation brings a sense of closure for past good works and provides the incentive they need to work hard and earn acclamations in the future.
Empty feedback is the result of poor and inattentive leadership. It occurs when managers give no feedback, good or bad. When employees are doing well they don’t hear about it, and when they do poorly they are not confronted. In simplest terms, this means that people performing productively are less likely to continue to do so since their behaviors aren’t being reinforced; at the same time, those slouching or underperforming continue their derelict duty since it is not addressed. By virtue of their neglect managers guilty of empty feedback extinguish productive behavior at the same time they unwittingly encourage slack efforts. Managers that won’t come down off their hierarchy horse, who stay locked in their offices—presiding rather than leading—and who otherwise fall out of touch with their people are the biggest perpetrators of empty feedback. Their aloofness creates performance casualties at all levels. These weak leaders are often the most likely to look out the window and curse their people’s performance when the real problem is staring back at them in the mirror.
As bad as the term negative reinforcement sounds, it is a legitimate aspect of coaching. There comes a time when enough is enough. You’ve dangled carrot after carrot, given endless pep talks, and begged and pleaded for performance until you’re worn out. You don’t want to fire the person yet, but you desperately need to turn them around. Enter negative reinforcement. Negative reinforcement attaches a consequence for continued poor performance. In essence, it says, “Do it or else.” Behavioral science teaches that if you want to change someone’s behavior, you’ve got to change the consequence for that behavior. Consequences can be either carrots or sticks. In the case of negative reinforcement, it’s the stick. The fact is, you’ve used negative reinforcement instinctively throughout your whole life. It’s what you did to stop your kids from beating up their little brother and coloring the walls with crayons. It’s how you teach your pet not to unleash its facilities on your carpet or chew the sofa. It’s a key reason that, after you suffer the consequence of a speeding ticket, you become more aware of your speed and change your driving habits to abide by the limit—at least for a while.
The key to negative reinforcement is to use it strictly to turn around poor performance. Once the performance improves, you switch back to positively reinforcing the person. Continuing to negatively reinforce people to improve their performance is exhausting for you and the person. In fact, if you have an employee who responds only to negative reinforcement—who does the job only when threatened with a consequence—it’s a sure sign you have the wrong person. When you sit down with an employee and give negative reinforcement, it’s important you document your conversation and both the expected target and the consequence in writing and put these in the employee’s file. This creates a vital paper trail you’ll need later if you must follow through and terminate that employee. You should also help the person map out what he or she must do to turn this performance around, and offer support and encouragement. As important as it is to let people know where they stand, you can’t just let them know and then leave them there.
It’s also important that even after you negatively reinforce someone you begin to positively reinforce their new behaviors once the person displays the actions you’re looking for. Also, it’s important to keep in mind that trying to help someone form a new habit will take four to five times the reinforcement you think it should—so stay after it.
Negative reinforcement is a form of tough love. It means you care enough to confront people and get them out of a gray area as you show them the route to better performance. Effective leaders leverage both positive and negative reinforcement appropriately. You can’t just walk around dangling carrots or spend all your time wielding sticks and expect to coach people to higher levels of performance. You must employ a combination of both, swiftly and consistently. It takes constant attention and commitment but, when all is said and done, it’s well worth the payoff you get when people improve their performance.
Constructive feedback is designed to improve the behavior of an employee by coaching and showing him or her how to improve performance. Constructive feedback is not saying, “You really screwed that up!” In fact, that type of feedback is debilitating. Constructive feedback is given when you point out a deficiency in a behavior but offer help on how to make it better next time. As leaders, we need to receive constructive feedback so we can keep growing, and your people need to hear it from you so they continue to grow as well.
A chapter on feedback wouldn’t be complete without a statement of how important it is that you continue to get it for your own performance. While you can help others grow by giving it, you grow by getting it. The problem is that most leaders don’t ask for it and still more aren’t interested in hearing it. Some managers declare that they have an open-door policy and that people can come in and give them feedback any time they like. The sad fact is that most people won’t, and those who do are always the same people. A real open-door policy allows the leader to go through the open door and ask the tough questions to subordinates and superiors alike: “What can I do better? How can I help you better do your job? What do I do around here that destroys momentum and attitudes and that I should stop doing?” It takes courage to ask these questions, and honest answers often hurt. But I know of no better way to build trust and openness and to grow your own leadership skills.
A business owner who attended my leadership seminar told me that he had devised a survey he passed out to employees that allowed them to rate him from 1 to 10 in several areas and turn the surveys in anonymously. One of the categories he asked to be rated in concerned his effectiveness as a motivator. He then told me he had only scored a 2 in this category. He told me, “Dave, in order for me to score two, there were a lot of ones that showed up on the surveys to bring my average down. I had to take a hard look in the mirror. I thought that overall I was a productive force in the workplace, but I discovered I was actually destructive and acted on the feedback to change my approach.”
I can recall when I was director of training for a large automotive training company and I was being trained to conduct a three-day sales workshop. The company broke me in to holding their classes by letting me have my first shot in a small town, so if I botched it I wouldn’t offend too many people. They also sent a small panel of judges—solemn-looking women who sat in the back of the room with frowns on their faces, making notes of my successes and victories while I conducted class. After the first day of my first class, I sat down with my judges to receive their feedback on my performance. I felt pretty good about the class and was looking forward to being acclaimed during this review. I was in for an eye-opener. They started the feedback session by covering the things I had done well. There were three things on that list. (Keep in mind this was an eight-hour class!) Then we discussed the areas where I needed to improve. I can still remember to this day that there were sixty-seven things on that list. It took three and one-half hours to cover it. This feedback session was one of the toughest things I had ever been through. I felt like I had been stomped on and run into the wall. I wasn’t excited about hearing what they had to say. In many instances, I didn’t think I needed to hear what they had to say. But the fact was that I did need to hear it, and it helped me tremendously. The next day there were only twenty-two items on the list, and the third day there were only six. Pretty soon, those sour, dour judges stopped following me around as I earned their confidence to hold the classes without supervision.
Be aware that you’re getting feedback every day if you’re paying attention. For instance, if you have an open-door policy and no one’s coming through it, that’s a form of feedback on how you’re perceived as a listener and as being open to change. If you have good people who continually leave your organization, that’s also a form of feedback on your role as a leader and motivator. If you are in charge of people who aren’t getting much better, this is a serious indication of your hiring, training, and coaching skills. Suffice it to say that feedback is all around you. You just need to care enough to open your eyes and ears and realize it’s the key to growing yourself.
An important part of effective feedback is one-on-one coaching sessions you have with your employees. One-on-ones are much less rigid than formal performance evaluations and give you a greater opportunity to connect with and build relationships with team members.
Early in my management career I attended a seminar that advised me to hold one-on-ones with my salespeople. This sounded like a great idea. The problem was that they never told me how to conduct them. Thus, my one-on-ones weren’t very effective. In fact, they were similar to indictments. I’d bring each employee into my office, effectively swear them in, and read a list of ten charges against them. Soon, no one wanted to have a one-on-one with me.
Fortunately, I discovered an effective five-step method for holding high-impact one-on-one coaching sessions. Follow this process the next time you go behind closed doors with an employee and your impact will increase exponentially.
Start the one-on-one by asking the person questions. This opens people up and gives them air. Ask about their goals, their strategies, their progress or frustrations, how they think team morale and output could be improved, and how you can help them better do their jobs.
The “ask” step is counterintuitive to most managers because the natural tendency is to start a one-on-one by telling. However, effective leaders always diagnose before they prescribe. Think about how a doctor treats you. Before writing out a prescription or rattling off a snappy answer, the doctor is careful to find out what ails you. Just as you’d have little confidence in a doctor who prescribes a solution before diagnosing your ailment, your “prescriptions” won’t be well received until your people feel you’re tuned in to what’s really going on with them and their careers.
After you ask questions, have the good sense to zip it and listen without interrupting. Don’t judge or jump down the employee’s throat or you’ll sabotage the one-on-one and wind up presiding over its disintegration. While listening, don’t shift from being a coach to becoming a know-it-all problem solver. Teach your people to discover their own answers by asking them what they think their options are and what they think will or won’t work. Many leaders have a hard time listening because they’re used to doing all the talking. But it’s important to remember that leadership is a dialogue, not a monologue, and you can never learn a thing while talking. After all, no good idea ever entered the head through an open mouth.
Only after going through steps 1 and 2 are you ready to credibly coach your employee. At this stage you should make suggestions and offer solutions that haven’t been discovered yet. You should also focus people on what they can control and not let them assume the posture of victim. Otherwise, one-on-ones tend to turn into therapy sessions. You’ll also find that if you diligently work through steps 1 and 2, the person will be more open to what you have to stay at this point since he or she feels understood and believes you have a better grasp of the situation.
This is your opportunity to praise and reinforce the behaviors and results the employee has displayed. Ideally, you will have done this earlier, closer to the actual time of the action, but this gives you a chance to reaffirm those behaviors or mention them for the first time if you’ve missed prior opportunities to reinforce. When it comes to reinforcement, err on the side of giving too much of it rather than thinking you’re overdoing it. I’ve never had anyone say, “You know, boss, the problem with you is that you reinforce me too darned much.”
Challenging the person and establishing accountability for future action and results is an effective way to end a one-on-one. This step gives you a chance to redefine what is expected, encourage stretching and growth toward the objective, and set a benchmark for future accountability.
I recommend you start a one-on-one binder with dividers for each of the people you hold these coaching sessions with. The binder can contain notes from prior meetings, the employee’s current results, charts, graphs, and so on. How often you hold these meetings is up to you, but keep in mind that the more often you conduct them the less time they’ll require. Personally, I wouldn’t want more than a week to pass without having a one-on-one with my top people. (I’ll discuss the importance of paying attention to your top people as a priority later in this chapter.) You may also find it helpful to schedule one-on-ones instead of waiting until you have everything else done before trying to hold one, or you’ll find they’ll never get done. These coaching sessions should be a priority. They offer an unmatched opportunity to connect, build relationships with, listen to, learn from, teach, coach, guide, and hold accountable the valuable human capital you have the privilege of leading.
One-on-one training differs from one-on-one coaching in that you’re performing a task with the employee, hands-on. When training someone to do a task, the best method is to first perform the task and have the employee watch you do it. Then, do it with the employee. Finally, he or she does it while you watch, after which you offer reinforcement and feedback on his or her performance. Too many managers would rather sit in their office chairs and talk about what good performance looks like than climb into the trenches and show people what it looks like. If you’ve been spending more time saying should-be than showing how-to, it’s time to climb down off the hierarchy horse and lead by personal example rather than by personal convenience.
Mentoring is not for everyone whom you are directly responsible for leading. It is reserved for those with the most upward mobility: the ready, willing, and able. After all, your job as a leader is not to smack someone in the head with a bat and drag them around the bases. Every leader needs an inner circle of leaders in whom he or she invests more time, energy, and resources. John Maxwell, in The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership (Thomas Nelson, 1998), describes the Law of the Inner Circle:[13] “Those closest to the leader determine the leader’s success.” Bearing this in mind, it is obvious how your inner circle is going to make or break your long-term leadership success. After all, you can’t do it alone. Who makes up your inner circle? What are you doing to pour yourself into these people? These are the team members you know will produce the greatest return on investment in production and results. Mentoring gives you the opportunity to build depth and multiply yourself through these key people in your organization. Here are three steps to effective mentoring.
This starts with sitting down individually with each of your mentees and letting them know you’ve identified them as people with high potential and that you want to help them map out a growth path. Go over each person’s strengths and discuss what you see as the next level of performance or job competency they should reach on their career paths. Discuss skill gaps they have that must be closed to reach these new levels, and together devise a plan to close those gaps. An important part of closing skill gaps is delegation. This word makes most leaders cringe because they’ve been burned by past efforts to delegate and have martyred themselves into doing the job themselves if they want it done right. Thus, overburdened by the menial and mundane, they plateau and fail to grow those around them. Here are ten keys that will help you delegate to accelerate the growth of your best people.
Delegate, don’t dump. Dumping is when you toss a file of forms on someone’s desk Friday at 4:00 P.M. and say you need them done by Monday at 9:00 A.M. This is abusive and creates delegation resistance. People feel like their reward for doing good work is having more work tossed at them by an ungrateful louse mandating an unreasonable deadline. Instead, explain why the task is important and that it is part of their development process.
Do the task with them. By performing the task with them a time or two before letting them run with it, you’ll have a chance to show how it should be done, gauge their aptitude for the task, and build their confidence.
Delegate to people’s strengths. Know your people well enough to hand off jobs they are wired to do. The whole idea is for them to gain a victory, build confidence, increase their competence, and be ready for the even bigger assignments. You can’t attain this if you’re throwing them into arenas where they have little background or aptitude.
Clearly communicate what you want done and by when. Clarity is power, so be specific. Have them paraphrase back to you what you want done to determine their level of understanding.
Don’t micromanage. Don’t give them a ten-step plan to attain the outcome. If you do, they’ll never take ownership. The task will still belong to you, and if it doesn’t work out they won’t accept responsibility since they were just executing the plan you administered. Instead, delegate outcomes without providing step-by-step methods. Advise people of minefields to avoid, but let them use their own ingenuity and energy to attain the outcome. Micromanagement is always easier in the short term, but your people won’t grow.
Give the tools they need to get the job done. You have every right to ask that something be done but no right to expect it to get done if you don’t provide the authority and resources necessary to pull it off. Clear away obstacles for your employees and make sure they have the discretion they need to make it happen. Set up directed autonomy. This is where the person can go to a certain point on his or her own without having to check with you.
Communicate throughout the process. Delegation is not an excuse to take a totally hands-off posture toward the task at hand, since you still own the ultimate responsibility for accomplishing it. Depending on the duration of the task, meet with the person periodically—not to micromanage but to offer support, answer questions, get updates, and keep your finger on the pulse of what’s going on. This also presents positive accountability to keep the employee focused on getting the job done on time.
Expect and accept a certain number of mistakes. You can’t grow people in a sterile and antiseptic manner. Sometimes it gets messy. People will make mistakes. In fact, mistakes are part of the growth process. The key is to use the error as a teaching opportunity and not as a battering ram. It’s also important that you let the person know up front that you expect people who try new things to make mistakes, but that you don’t expect them either to get defensive about them or to repeat them.
Avoid delegating to people who don’t share your vision. You don’t need to fight these battles just to prove a point. The fact is, when you delegate to people who aren’t on the same page as you, they have a chance to sabotage the process—whether consciously or unconsciously—to prove they were right and you were wrong.
Lose your insecurity. Many leaders don’t delegate because they are insecure. They fear giving power away and don’t want to take the chance that anyone else might be as good as they are at a task. Other times, some managers won’t hand off tasks because they get a high personal return from executing the task and don’t want to let it go. And occasionally you find managers who won’t hand tasks off because they think they’re indispensable and are convinced no one else can do anything as well as they can. If you have any of these mind-sets, you will never grow a team. Your selfishness will curse you by immersing you in work you shouldn’t have to do and will curse your team by stunting their growth. In addition to frustrating good people while they are in your employ, you can also count on running a good number of them off.
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The number one reason good people leave an organization is to pursue personal growth opportunities elsewhere.
If you are a pompous leader and believe yourself to be indispensable, let me take the pressure off you: You’re not that good! No one is. As Charles de Gaulle said, “The graveyard is filled with indispensable men.” Let’s face it: The day will come when you leave this earth and those you leave behind will put you in a box, lower you into the ground, shovel dirt on your face, and go back to the church to eat fried chicken and potato salad while they discuss the upcoming ball game that weekend. In other words, life goes on with or without you, so, if you’ll forgive my bluntness, get over yourself—everyone else has!
Delegating doesn’t diminish your importance. In fact, delegating multiplies your importance. Just as one candle’s lighting another doesn’t diminish its own light but multiplies it, so it is when you grow others. Delegation also offers you the exciting opportunity to hand off your weaknesses to others who are stronger than you in a given area. This frees you up to spend more time working in your areas of strength, which is the only way you can attain excellence. Part of growing up as a leader is looking in the mirror and knowing what you’re wired to do and what you’re not, and having the good sense to supplement your weaknesses with a strong team. In four decades, I’m somewhat embarrassed to say I’ve only found two personal talents: writing and speaking. I can’t sing, dance, draw, paint, sculpt, fix, or build anything; I’m not good at any sport and can’t play musical instruments. And I’m okay with this because I’ve finally realized that the mantra of “jack-of-all-trades and master of none” was a recipe for obscurity in business and in life. Life is simpler when you have only two strengths. It’s easy to decide what to do and what to hand off to your team. I’m more effective and much happier than I was when I thought I had to do it myself if I wanted it done right. My people are happier as well, as they get chances to grow and contribute at higher levels of responsibility.
Giving your people stretch assignments is your opportunity to accelerate the growth of your best people. It’s a win/win/win situation. You win because you’re freed up to do more of what you’re effective at. Others win because they become more competent, grow personally, gain confidence, and become more valuable to the organization. The organization wins by allowing people at all levels to be more productive and effective and by ensuring its long-term vitality through building a bench of more effective people at all levels. As a final note on delegation, consider it an opportunity to get rid of your weaknesses. Working in areas where you’re no good drains you, and part of the joy of building a great team is surrounding yourself with others who complement your strengths and neutralize your weaknesses.
The second step to mentor your high potentials is to help each develop a plan for personal growth. The best way to teach this is when you model your own personal growth program. A personal growth program is a discipline you develop to deliberately upgrade your own competencies. It may be something as simple as reading one book or listening to one compact disc per month on a topic in your field. If necessary, buy the first book or tape and put it in their hands. Tell them you’ll get together in a month and cover the key points they gleaned from the work. Start a library at your business. This will put a visible priority on personal growth. The key to a personal growth plan is that it must be deliberate and measurable. If you read every once in a while, when you find the time, you don’t have an effective personal growth program. There is nothing to hold you accountable or to measure your progress. Just like an exercise program, a personal growth program takes discipline and commitment. I’ll discuss in Chapters 5 and 6 the importance of your developing this discipline and modeling personal growth before you can credibly expect others to adopt their own plan.
As you build a team you should do so with the goal of continually making them less dependent on you. In fact, the only way you can create this condition is to make your people more competent. In my first sales management job, I had this concept backward. I thought that the more my people relied upon me, the better a leader I was. I’d take the day off and my home phone would ring twelve times with my minions asking advice and permission on a number of trivial matters. I’d hang up the phone at the end of the day, sit back in my overstuffed chair, and proudly tell my wife about the job security I had at work. After all, what would these people do without me? I was the shepherd and they were my sheep. When it came time to take a vacation, it never failed: My team’s sales would tank. With my corrupt understanding of effective leadership, I’d point out to my spouse that every time I took a few days off my boss must gain a whole new appreciation for my value since nothing got done in my absence. Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! If I’d had a clue about being an effective leader I’d have realized that my people’s failure in my absence was an indictment of my leadership, not an endorsement of it. I’d have known that the fact that I made all the decisions and had to sign off on all ideas that weren’t my own was a reflection of leadership weakness, not strength.
I had created a state in my people known as learned powerlessness. When people are in this state they have become too dependent on the leader and they stop taking initiative. They won’t make a decision, seize an opportunity, or make a change on their own. If you instill this state in your team you’ll lose good people and plateau whatever and whomever you lead. Your ego may be fattened by people’s reliance on you, but the esteem of your followers is diminished.
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The truest measure of your leadership is how well your people perform in your absence, not how they perform while you breathe down their necks.
What are you doing to make your people less dependent on you? The following are two places to start.
Trust is reciprocal. So is distrust. Whichever you exhibit to followers comes back to you multiplied. This may sound like a basic question, but I’ll ask it anyway: Do you trust your people? If you answered in the affirmative, here’s another question: How much money can they spend, on the spot, to solve a customer problem without any management sign-off? If your answer is that they can’t, because you want them to run each situation by you, you are communicating distrust. You don’t trust either their character or their competence, or you’d give them discretion in this area. And if your response is that if I knew your people I’d understand why you can’t trust them, you should look in the mirror—because the fact that you have people around you incapable of making a five-dollar decision is not a reflection of them as followers. It’s a reflection of you as their leader.
Oftentimes, leaders declare that after their people earn trust and prove themselves they’ll push power and increased discretion down to lower levels. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work this way. People should be given a prescribed benefit of the doubt or you shouldn’t have hired them in the first place. How they live up to this trust will determine whether their boundaries are broadened or withdrawn in the future, but you must trust them first. And don’t fool yourself into thinking that increasing trust and broadening the discretion that goes with it will spur your people to turn the inch you’re giving them into a mile. Quite the opposite—you’ll find that people who have been given trust have a powerful incentive not to screw up.
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It is impossible to develop people you don’t trust. If you don’t trust them, you shouldn’t have hired them—and shouldn’t be keeping them—in the first place.
When you do empower people with trust, you have an obligation to train them to use their power wisely, because choice without competence is dangerous. Give them directed autonomy. This is where you set limits bordered with boundaries. People are allowed to make decisions within these parameters before having to check with you. As they make good decisions you should increase their autonomy in proportion to their success. If they abuse their power you must deal with them accordingly. This may include counseling, retraining, reprimanding for repeat offenses, or removing discretion.
Find ways to make fewer of the decisions yourself. When people bring you problems, rather than rattling off a quick-fix response, ask what they think should be done. If what they suggest makes sense, let them run with it. If your people have become conditioned to relying on you for the trivial, it may take some time to wean them off you, but by getting them in the habit of discovering their own answers you’ll build the competence and confidence within them they need to grow.
It’s vital that you empower intelligently. Empowerment is probably one of the most overused words and most abused concepts of the past decade. In fact, when I hear a manager talking about empowerment, my first impulse is to reach for the Maalox. Clearly, not everyone in an organization deserves the same level of empowerment. The key is to establish prescribed powers everyone shares in and then to elevate or diminish those limits based on proven performance. Empowering recklessly is dangerous. In fact, I’ve been inside many organizations where micromanagement would have been a more appropriate style of running the business than empowerment. Incidentally, if you are going to hire the wrong people, I highly suggest you micromanage them! It’s a pitiful strategy for growing a business, but if you’re going to bring morons on board, empowering them will only exacerbate the misery.
Studying history is my hobby. I find you can learn volumes about leadership when you do: people who did it well and people who screwed it up. We can learn from both. When you study the Civil War, you find a classic example of an empowering leader versus a micromanager. President Lincoln was a great empowerer. He’d take a general, tell him what he wanted done, provide unwavering support, and get out of the way. However, Lincoln’s mistake was empowering the wrong generals. For the first couple years of the war, Lincoln empowered incompetents, and the North failed to win a major battle. However, to his credit, the president didn’t stay with the wrong general too long. He’d normally give them a matter of months and if they didn’t get the job done, he’d replace them. After six attempts at finding the right general-in-chief, he appointed Ulysses Grant.[14] Grant, while unorthodox, was a winner. His victories turned the momentum on the western front of the war.[15] As often happens with sudden popularity, though, criticism came with the territory: Some congressmen started taking shots at Grant. In fact, a delegation approached Lincoln at the White House and complained that Grant was a drunk and shouldn’t be leading the army.[16] President Lincoln reportedly instructed his aides to find out what brand Grant drank so he could distribute it to the rest of his generals and win the war!
Leading the Confederacy was Jefferson Davis, and he was blessed with the most talented generals in the divided country. When the Civil War began, the best and brightest generals in the United States joined the Confederacy. There was one big problem: Davis was a micromanager. He meddled in everything, became involved in many areas, and created complexity where it didn’t belong. He was more interested in being right than in what worked; and when he should have been thinking like a revolutionary, he thought like a bureaucrat. Managers today can learn a poignant lesson from Jefferson Davis about the penalties of micromanaging good people, slowing them down, breaking their momentum, and lowering their morale. A more recent example would be the devastating impact Jacques Nasser’s micromanagement style had on Ford Motor Company. No one could question Nasser’s work ethic. Unfortunately, it was directed toward doing things personally that he should have built a team to do. You must know when to micromanage and when to empower. Lean very heavily toward empowerment, but empower the right people.
As a leader, you can err on the side of micromanagement or you can err on the side of letting people try things. I suggest you err on the side of letting people try things. The benefits of higher morale, more capable people, and potential for breakthrough will more than offset the cost of an occasional mistake.
One of the most common management mistakes is to treat everyone on the team the same. Managers motivate, reward, and allocate time, resources, and opportunities equally across the board. In fact, when they do distribute these things unequally, it’s normally in favor of the bottom-rung performers, with the result that top people—the strengths of the organization—are ignored. But the only way you can fix, build, or stretch your organization to new levels is by leveraging its strongest people, not trying to repair the weakest ones—many of whom shouldn’t be on the team in the first place.
The Pareto Principle, also known as the 80–20 rule, stipulates that 20 percent of the people do 80 percent of the work. In other words, there are people in every workplace who are substantially more valuable to the organization than the others are. This brings up an important question: What are you doing to reward, equip, empower, and motivate your top 20 percent? Do you treat your top 20 percent the same as your bottom 20 percent? If so, what message does that send about your appreciation and support of excellence in your business? And what’s it costing you to let your strengths atrophy as you misuse rewards, time, energy, and resources?
When conducting workshops, I often hear two objections to “giving your best to your best.” People ask about all the high-potential people in the middle and at the bottom of the organization—how will you ever develop them if you’re spending all your time with top people? Another complaint is that it’s just not fair to spend more time, money, energy, and resources on those already doing well. These are legitimate concerns. First, I don’t believe your highest-potential people are in the middle or at the bottom of the ladder in most organizations. Over time, you may find a few there, but to a large extent your highest-potential people are those already excelling. These people have clearly demonstrated that they have the skills, habits, attitudes, and talents to be better than average. And for the most part, many got to that point without much time or attention from you.
As for the fact that it doesn’t seem fair to more fully support your top 20 percent, let’s redefine fairness: Treating people fairly in business doesn’t mean you treat them all alike. Treating people fairly means you treat them in a manner they’ve earned and deserve, and they haven’t all earned—nor do they deserve—the same amount of your time and attention, or the same pay plan, schedules, or opportunities. Fairness doesn’t mean sameness. Fairness means justice, and justice means you get what you deserve. Think about it for a moment: What could be fairer than treating people in accordance with what they have earned and deserve? In fact, who are the only people in your organization who would have an objection to getting strictly what they earned and deserved? The laggards, of course: those who don’t earn or deserve much—the people who want the maximum return possible for the least effort and results. In addition, I’m not advocating that you ignore anyone. What I am suggesting is that you reallocate adequate time, energy, resources, and rewards to support and stretch your top people. As a matter of fact, if anyone is ignored in most organizations it’s the top people. Obviously, everyone in an organization must be held to the same high standard of character, customer care, and work ethic. But beyond that, rewards and resources should be distributed according to what people have earned and deserve based on performance.
A manager who worked for me struggled to grasp the “give your best to the best” strategy. Charles was honest, fair, and good-hearted. He told me he had always prided himself on trying to be everything to everyone. I told him that while I could appreciate his intentions, no effective leader had ever endeavored to be everything to everyone. All great leaders identify with and pour more into their high potentials, their inner circle from whom they know they’ll gain a greater return. Charles, still skeptical, asked for an example. I asked him if he thought Jesus was an effective leader, and he vigorously nodded. I then asked if He had spent equal time with everyone. Charles replied that Jesus spent most of his time with the twelve disciples. I agreed and then asked the key question: Did He spend equal time with each of the twelve? The answer is no. There were three—John, James, and Peter—who sojourned on special field trips, were exposed to different experiences, and received extra attention. After all, Jesus had three years to get the job done and twelve uneducated men to equip. He knew they weren’t all going to get it like He’d want them to get it, so He invested in those who would bring the greatest return after his departure. I told Charles the good news: You don’t have to invent great new leadership principles. Success leaves clues, and you can emulate what other great leaders have done. Giving your best to your best is nothing to apologize for. Ignoring them and failing to develop their full potential is worthy of apology.
While running the sales operations for a $300 million dealer group, the leadership team and I decided to put greater emphasis on encouraging and rewarding excellence. We had bold goals and knew we couldn’t reach them without leveraging our strengths, so we started what we called a “Top 20 Percent Club.” For instance, in a dealership with twenty salespeople, more focus and attention would go toward fully developing our top four. Since we were a volume-oriented organization, we decided that top unit sales would be the qualifier. We ran the contest quarterly. Salespersons who made it into the top 20 percent club earned a cash bonus. Since top performers are recognition oriented, the dealer would take them out to lunch as a group each month, anywhere they wanted to go, and let them order anything they wanted to eat. In addition, each top 20 percent club member would receive the help of a temp (temporary employee) four hours each week to unburden them from the curse of all top salespeople: paperwork. The temp would make follow-up calls and handle mailers, cards, and other administrative tasks, freeing our top people up to do more of what they did best: sell!
We also trained our managers to hold one-on-one coaching sessions with their top people first. We wanted to make certain our stars were listened to, challenged, and motivated as a priority. Psychology teaches that humans love attention and that from the day we are born we’re wired for it. Some people like more attention than others, but no one likes to be ignored. Another lesson of human nature is that when someone feels like they’re not getting enough attention they’ll change their behavior until they do. Just as a baby cries when ignored, adults will do something, consciously or unconsciously, to get someone else’s attention. This is evinced in relationships, at the workplace, and on sports teams. Bearing this knowledge of human nature in mind, think about this: Who are the last people in your organization you want changing their behavior just to get your attention? The top people, of course! But that’s exactly what happens. Oftentimes a manager will tell me that the top person is negative, comes in late, or does something that creates distractions. If they don’t feel special, appreciated, significant, and supported, you can’t blame them! In fact, it’s only human nature for them to do something to wake you up.
When the management team and I discussed the top 20 percent club concept, there was a fear the top people would become arrogant and selfish if a special club were designated for them. We overcame this possibility by clearly establishing ground rules up front and at the outset. We told our top performers that with additional privilege came responsibility and that we would hold them to a higher standard and expect them to act more like leaders. When we began treating them in accordance with these higher expectations they responded well. Our top performers saw themselves differently because we treated them differently, and their improved self-image was reflected in their performance. We found them spending more time assuming a mentor’s role and endeavoring to get the strugglers up to speed.
Predictably, one group of employees who were alarmed at the prospect of a club to stretch and reward our top people were our marginal performers. In fact, it made them squirm. After our new standards had been defined and more focus put on creating excellence, the bottom 20 percent of the team began filtering out of our organization and moving to employers where their mediocrity was accepted.
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When you set the bar high the winners will love it and the losers will leave it. Either way, you win.
A client attending one of my presentations returned to his dealership to stretch his top performer. He told me that Harvey had averaged forty-three car sales per month. When you bear in mind that the average sales for the industry is ten, you can grasp Harvey’s value to their business. Unfortunately, management had ignored him for years, letting Harvey fend for himself while they wasted time pumping up and propping up the bottom dwellers. When the managers approached Harvey they told him they didn’t feel he had maximized his potential yet, but they knew he’d need help from them to reach a higher level and offered assistance. Harvey replied that if he weren’t buried in sheaves of paperwork and administration he could sell more cars. The managers assigned an assistant to help Harvey and free him up to do what he did best: sell cars. In sixty days, Harvey raised his sales from forty-three to sixty-four cars per month, totally destroying the conventional wisdom that mandates you wear yourself out repairing the weakest team members.
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If you spend all your time trying to turn strugglers into survivors you’ll have little time left for the rewarding work of helping your good people become great.
If you run a small organization, a top 20 percent club may not seem feasible. But if you stay flexible you can send the same message about your standards and stretch your best people with a “president’s club” or “top gun club” that rewards all performers attaining prescribed performance targets. You may also change your benefits and criteria from time to time, but the simpler you keep it, the better. Too many qualifiers or regulations confuse matters and cause people to lose interest.
Occasionally a top performer will threaten to leave—or actually will leave—for a bigger paycheck elsewhere. While you can’t prevent this from happening, you can limit the frequency by doing the following:
Compete on dollars and win on culture. I’ve never seen a top performer who was offended by money. However, it takes more than money to attract and retain eagles. The cultural aspects that make up your environment (as discussed in Chapter 1) are key factors. Be fair with financial remuneration or you will lose more stars than you should, but build an environment that addresses such intrinsic human desires as trust, room to grow, association with a great team, meaningful work, and recognition—benefits that are difficult to quantify financially.
Be proactive with raises. One of the most senseless decisions a manager can make is to allow eagles to leave over financial differences, only to offer them more money to return at a later date. If you’d pay more to get a solid performer back, pay them now so they don’t leave and create distractions, take other key players with them, lower morale, and break your momentum. In fact, if you proactively approach an employee with a raise before he or she has to go through the agony of soliciting one from you, you’ll get away with paying less money. Your making the move first builds greater inner satisfaction and self-esteem within the employees, making them less focused on what they were going to ask you for—an amount that is normally more than the preemptive raise you gave them.
Get a trade-off. When you are approached for and decide to give a raise, get something in return. Ask the person which new responsibilities the person would be interested in assuming to justify the increased pay, or what the person would be willing to learn to augment his or her value to the organization. What you’ll bargain for depends, of course, on the person and situation.
Keep your ego in check. Don’t let personal pride interfere with making the right compensation decisions for your best people. It helps to remember that the most expensive people on your payroll aren’t the highest-paid people: The most expensive people on your payroll are the unproductive people. I recall an entrepreneur who should have known better boasting to me about how cheaply he was able to hire his new general manager. I told him that before long, he’d know precisely why he exacted such a bargain, because it would show up in his lack of results.
Differentiate according to results more than tenure and credentials. Weight compensation packages more heavily toward performance, not tenure, credentials, or experience. Otherwise, the dreaded entitlement discussed in Chapter 2 will sink its roots into your organization and debilitate your culture.
If you don’t give extra support, recognition, rewards, and opportunities to your top 20 percent, what have you given your middle 60 percent to emulate? Nothing! And the problem is that if your middle 60 percent isn’t trying to become like the top 20 percent they tend to become more like the bottom 20 percent by default. Use the power of your top 20 percent to neutralize the negative influence of your bottom 20 percent.
You cannot grow a high-performance team until your leadership style dictates that truth trumps harmony. An old cliché declares that great teams are composed of members who all love one another and bask in perpetual harmony. Wrong! The best teams I know fight. But they fight about issues, not personalities. And just as important, they have the ability to have a brutally honest discussion, anchored in conflict, make a decision, and then put their differences behind them and emerge as a team once again.
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A real team concept is not one in which everyone gets along. It’s one in which everyone puts the team first, regardless of personal differences.
A culture that embraces—insists on—dissent and conflict must start with the leader. With this in mind, ask yourself: Can your people challenge you without fear of negative consequences? Can they tell you, with all due respect, in the proper tone and place, that they think you’re wrong and that they have a better way? If they can, you’ll get the best they have because they’ll bring their all to you. But if they can’t, you’ll develop blind spots because people will become accustomed to telling you what you want to hear instead of what you need to hear.
As a rule, leaders talk too much at their staff meetings and are too domineering. Unfortunately, this “let the boss do all the talking and all the thinking” mind-set carries on after the meeting as people go about their jobs. As an observer, I’ve sat in disgust in meetings where heads bounce up and down like a bunch of bobble-heads while the boss gives a soliloquy. Everyone is all smiles and gives the “kiss of yes” to what is being ordained right before joining hands, singing Kumbaya, and leaving to play golf. If something like this happens at your workplace you can rest assured of one thing: As your team skips cheerily down the yellow-brick road, the tough issues aren’t being looked at and the path you’re on will take you smack into a wall of irrelevance.
At staff meetings an astute leader is a questioning machine, not an answering machine. He or she states the issue at hand without giving a personal opinion on resolution, insists on input from the meeting participants, and ensures that ideas are not fire-hosed and everyone is heard. The leader then processes what has been discussed and presents his or her view, while encouraging the team to shoot some holes in it, until resolution is achieved. This doesn’t mean the leader runs things as a democracy: While everyone has an equal voice, they don’t all have an equal vote. However, since conflict brings about clarity, you’re less likely to make poor decisions and walk onto a minefield.
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Too much harmony is cancerous to decision making. Conflict brings clarity. It ensures that every side of an issue is examined. The bigger the decision or risk, the more conflict you need.
Great teams challenge the leader and one another without its becoming personal, and once the decision is made they unite behind it. They don’t hold grudges. Some managers don’t seem to get this last point. They have their say at a meeting, but when things don’t go their way, they leave the meeting to pout, whine, complain to somebody, or call somebody to vent. The best advice you can offer these malcontents is that if things don’t go their way and they want to call someone after a meeting, they should call U-Haul to come and get them. Otherwise, their cancer will pervade your culture and future meetings. Colin Powell put this principle very well:
When we’re debating an issue, being loyal to me means giving me your opinion whether you think I’ll like it or not. At this point, disagreement stimulates me. But after the decision has been made, the debate ends. From this point on, being loyal to me means getting behind the decision and executing it as if it were your own.[17]
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To grow your team, you must assume the role of facilitator at your meetings rather than dictator.
As your people become accustomed to challenging one another and meeting tough issues head on, you can expect to see conflict. In fact, conflicts always arise when you have people who care about what they’re doing, think for themselves, and aren’t afraid to speak out. Resist the temptation to jump in and referee these disagreements. Encourage your people to work things out among themselves whenever possible. If your team becomes dependent upon your jumping in and solving their problems, they’ll never develop into a highly functional unit.
Throwing new hires into the fray of their job without proper orientation and culture inculcation is a leadership failure. After hiring the wrong person at the outset or having an ineffective manager under which an employee suffers, sloppy on-boarding processes are the primary culprit for poor employee retention.
While it often takes ninety days to gain a clear picture of how someone will do in their position, the first thirty days are the most essential to setting the stage for productive employment. To create even more urgency to get new hires off to a good start, realize that human resources studies show that within the first two weeks new employees have already either made up their minds that the workplace is what they expected or decided to continue with their job search—while continuing to collect your paychecks. Very early on new employees begin to sense that their basic needs for survival either will or will not be met at a particular job, and they will then react accordingly. I once conducted a forty-five-minute tele-seminar for clients on the topic of getting new hires off to a great start, and the feedback was such that I felt I should share the information on a broader basis. As a result, I decided to include it in the revised version of this book.
Following are five steps to incorporate into your current on-boarding process to get employees off to a fast and productive start and improve your retention of them for the long haul.
Highly structure their first day. During the first day of employment new employees are both excited and nervous. Without structure, their excitement will wane and their nervousness may turn to negativity. To pull this off, the following should take place:
The direct supervisor should take a primary role in assuring that the new hire’s first day is busy, focused, and productive. Don’t hand off new hires to a subordinate on the first day. As their boss, you should take an active leadership role in guiding them through their first day on the job.
Use a checklist with the most vital tasks to be accomplished that day. Your checklist should contain things like a tour of the business, a review of performance and behavioral expectations, a detailed explanation of the pay plan, and the like. Each point on the checklist should be signed off on by the employee and supervisor and given to Human Resources for placement in the employee’s file.
If you structure the first day right, there will be no real time for training. There will be plenty of time for training in upcoming days. The first day should be primarily focused on getting the employee acquainted with others, comfortable with the surroundings, and familiar with procedures and policies. Once these basic needs of security and safety are met, the employee is ready to move on to developing competencies and contributing to the team.
Set forth training objectives for the next thirty days so the employee knows up front what he or she is expected to learn. You may also assign a mentor to help with the designated areas. For instance, in sales, this may mean that in thirty days you will teach and expect the salesperson to learn a meet and greet, an appointment phone script, key investigative questions, a referral script, and the like. Even if the employee has experience in your industry it is important that you teach him or her to do things your way. At the end of thirty days test the person on the assigned training tasks. Put these expectations in writing and have the employee sign off on them.
Establish product knowledge goals for the first thirty days. You should focus your energies on your best-selling products first. You may wish to assign the salesperson one or two “products of the week” to learn about in depth. Assign a mentor to do presentations on these products with the new employee, and let the new hire know you will test him or her on these products at the end of a prescribed period of time. If the new employee is not in sales, customize this point so he or she learns the most vital aspects of his or her job: mastering certain reports, computer functions, and so forth.
Assign and pay a mentor to help the new employee master the tasks you’ve given. This person should be someone with a positive attitude who shares the company values. Depending on your pay scale, $250 per month or so is a good place to start when paying a mentor.
Personally meet with the new employee at least once weekly during the first month to formally gauge progress, make yourself available for questions, and reinforce his or her sense of belonging to the organization. You cannot just meet with a person once the first day without fast formal follow-up and expect to build a strong relationship with the person.
By following the prescribed activities and others like them, you will accomplish the following:
Make a much better impression on the new employee as a professional organization.
Give the direct supervisor the opportunity to establish a strong relationship with the new hire.
More quickly calm a new hire’s apprehensions and anxiety, which will help him or her reach higher levels of productivity faster.
Improve your chances of retaining the employee for the long term.
Create greater clarity of what you expect and by when, which eliminates confusion and excuses for nonperformance.
If you’ve ever studied Maslow’s motivational hierarchy of needs then you know that until a person is satisfied that he or she can survive and will be able to meet basic life needs, no speeches about being part of a great team or having the potential to make unlimited income will stir an employee for very long. New employees begin to make decisions about whether or not this basic survival need is being met very early on the job. If they are tossed to the wolves with no guidance or training; if they suspect that management doesn’t really care about them but only about what they produce; if they draw the conclusion that they’re working in an unprofessional workplace that burdens them with poverty wages while promising a sky-is-the-limit income—their basic instinct to survive will lead them first to mentally check out of the workplace and soon thereafter to leave it physically.