What is your workplace culture?

What is your workplace culture?  As an leader do you know?  Do you know the signs?

As an executive coach as well as a leadership trainer, I have been on the other end of conversations with employees that are too afraid to bring up challenging topics with their own bosses.  It is discouraging that some organizations continue to perpetuate a fear of reprisal if an employee verbalizes an opposing point of view.    Experts say, “we have become more brutal within organizations, and I don’t think that’s creating more productivity,” says Sheila M. Keegan, a London -based psychologist and business consultant who authored The Psychology of Fear in Organizations.  If employees are frightened, they simply do not perform well.  They are focused on the wrong things and are constantly looking over their shoulder waiting for the other shoe to drop.  We all know that when we are happy and productive, we work more effectively, and for health in the business, the use of health and safety for businesses is important to have the right services at this. To ensure accurate employee paystub, you can check out these helpful resources that can benefit your business. However, when it comes to business productivity, ensuring the right services are in place is crucial. To learn more about creating a healthier workplace environment, you can check this out for further insight at www.insidecbd.net. Also, for business strategies, consider exploring the services offered by these best Chicago SEO Agencies in Chicago. They can provide valuable insights and support to enhance your online presence and drive success for your business

How do we know if we have a culture of fear?  One telling sign is how employees behave in meetings.  Are they afraid to speak up until senior leaders leave the room?   “Employees at such organizations tend to keep a low profile.  They may work to the rule, doing exactly what is required of them but no more.  They have been the product of having their suggestions in the past being rejected, so they have stopped sharing their thoughts.”

Employees suffering from high stress levels are less engaged and less productive.  Even with improvement in the economy, fear and uncertainty continue to be fueled by technological advances that are eliminating more and more jobs.  Fear can quickly spread and undermine the morale of the entire workforce.  The best, but not easy, route is to get people talking and being honest with each other.

Keegan offers these tips:

  • Build Trust.  That means being straightforward, admitting mistakes, keeping promises, showing vulnerability and letting go of grievances.
  • Improve your listening skills.  Focus on what your employees are saying to you.  Hear and interpret their verbal and nonverbal communication.  Maintain a neutral and open attitude.  Most importantly, don’t judge.
  • Encourage risk-taking and reward.  Urge employees to experiment, learn and improvise.  Help them rediscover their sense of joy and intrinsic reward of working.
  • Treat employees with respect.  Acknowledge their worth and help them succeed.  If you are nice to people and support them, they become loyal.

For more information visit: www.shrm.org.

Stop Micro-Managing. Delegate!

Have you found yourself in your bosses office giving you feedback from your team that you are a micro-manager?  One of the perceptions derived from this criticism is that you are a great “operational” manager, but you are not a candidate for “strategic” leadership.  If you ponder this dilemma you are challenged by the possibility of losing control of the outcome, which your boss wants error free and your own insecurities about the competency of the members of your team.

“Managers prone to micromanagement fall prey to several misconceptions about delegating to staff. The first is the assumption that delegation has an on and off switch. That is, that they either delegate totally to all direct reports in all situations or not at all. They fail to assess each subordinate’s ability to operate independently and don’t put in place the “eyehooks” of implementation — the check-ins, milestones, and metrics — that promote predictable execution. And they forget that there are times when they need to get directly involved to get a major initiative back on course.”

Delegation benefits managers, direct reports, and organizations. Yet it remains one of the most underutilized and underdeveloped management capabilities.

Chronic problems with delegation can cripple your team’s productivity and create a major impediment to your own career success. We all have employees that we consider highly skilled often when we review their interaction with others, we find them in the middle of every decision.  By accepting this mentality, the team grounds to a halt.  Key people lose interest or don’t engage at all.  Operating at a higher level means allowing your team to figure out how to work together, how to collaborate, how to make decisions and how to problem solve.   If you find team members that are consistently telling you that they can HELP you with what you are doing and if you are working an inordinate amount of hours while they are going home at 5, then these are obvious signs that you are not utilizing your team effectively.

Possible Solutions:

  • Delegate and leverage your team more and figure out where you can add value to the overall performance of your team
  • Understand the talents and skills of the members of your team and delegate areas of a project where they can excel and teach them how to ramp up their skill sets and add more to the results.
  • Reshape the team so that roles play to the skills of your team; step back as the facilitator, allow the team to take on a leadership role by rotating responsibilities for leading team activities.  It doesn’t always have to be YOU.
  • Try to avoid asking your team members HOW they intend to complete the task.  Focus on questions that are more strategic like why did you decide to go in this direction or what is the scope of the task and their level of responsibility.
  • Provide key milestones and goals for the team to reach; create appropriate check ins to ensure that the team is operating effectively
  • Make sure you assign roles for note taking, tracking progress, deadlines and goals
  • Create a positive environment by role modeling
  • Remember that all team members operate differently.  Your challenge is to let go of how you would accomplish the task as long as they achieve quality results.

Learning to let go is one of the key skills for all managers.  Make sure you practice these skills and in the process you are creating a work force that will do the same.  [contact-form-7 404 "Not Found"]

Organizational Behavior: Key to Future Success for Leaders

“Gallup researchers, who base the Employee Engagement Index on a survey of nearly 42,000 randomly selected adults, estimate that disengaged workers cost US businesses as much as “$350 billion a year.”  Organizational Behavior and understanding how to integrate these practices in to business are critical to the success of leaders of the future.  Job security, careful hiring practices, self-managed teams, generous pay for performance, training, teamwork and trust-building skills provide the stanchions for stability and success.

Organizational behavior deals with how people act and react in organizations of all kinds.  Relative to your interpersonal effectiveness:  being a team player, negotiating for a win-win, change management, managing conflict, communicating and influencing, trust building, and leading others ultimately make you a success as a leaders.  Many technical employees (accountants, IT resources etc.) challenge the need to study organizational behavior as they don’t see the relevance to their current positions.  I would argue that eventually you may start out with a narrow specialty, but eventually your success in a company will be your ability to lead.  Your people skills, your emotional intelligence can make or break your career.

Today we have a team-oriented and globalized workplace,  your teamwork, cross-cultural, communication, conflict handling and your powers of persuasion will be tested.  Those who past the test will be those that thrive in organizations.

There are 4 critical activities to be aware of as you contemplate your place in your organization and your long-term goals.

  1. The human relations movement
  2. The quality movement
  3. The Internet and social media revolution
  4. The age of human and social capital

Growth depends on the sharing of valuable knowledge.  What good are bright employees who do not network, teach, inspire and motivate?”

If you are interested in hearing more about organizational behavior, please contact us.  We will be happy to customize a program for you or for members of your leadership team.   My thanks to Robert Krieitner and Angelo Kinicki for their sage and well written text entitled Organizational Behavior for the content of this article.