I often find that managers with high levels of empathy find it difficult to enforce critical workplace standards. Yet these two seemingly contradictory areas need to be complementary of one another within a manager to produce excellent morale and workplace results.
Obviously, we all intuitively know that quality leaders are optimistic. Without optimism it is easy to dishearten your team and create a bleak workplace climate that detracts from employee engagement and innovative outcomes. Effective optimism enables people to dream big and take calculated risks. We would all agree that it is critical for healthy team functioning and creating a culture that minimises a fear of failure, so what could go wrong with optimistic leaders? The key is to get the balance right so that a leader is not operating with a blind optimism. Blind optimism occurs when high optimism in a leader is not complemented with the ability to analyse the potential pitfalls in a plan or strategy. It is not about diminishing optimism to fix the problem, but more about balancing it out with due diligence in planning and decision-making. If this balance is not achieved either through personal leadership growth or through other collaborative team members whose strengths are in this area, eventually the organisation will be led into serious trouble. The negative impact of this imbalance not only puts an organisation at fiscal risk, causes stress on the leader, but it also creates other human collateral damage. So, let’s examine these. Imbalanced optimism impedes quality leadership results, because it hinders leaders from being persistent in playing the long game toward success. Instead, they tend to overcommit to too many new things by jumping at many exciting shiny objects that come across their path. This can only produce
One of the critical success factors of any organisation is the retention oftop talent. There is now no question that employee engagement heavily influences this. Furthermore, if you have been investigating this subject, you will know how important the direct manager’s relationship with any employee is to foster employee engagement. However, many managers have had little training in employee retention strategies. I have worked with developing managers for over 15 years and I want to share with you the bare bones of what can make any diligent manager into a genius in the area of employee engagement. Myths Must be Overcome: First there are some myths about employee engagement that need to be unmasked. Let’s dispel some of the myths that are being bandied around. Myth one: It is essentially an organisational issue: No, it is not essentially an organisational issue, but an individual psychological phenomenon within the psyche of each employee. Hence, by its very nature, it is a unique experience within each employee. Myth two: The best strategy to improve employee engagement is through an organisational level approach: Partly true, because context is always important, but left on its own without the individual approach, it will only ever be hit and miss. You need to predominantly address engagement at the individual level, plus examine if there are organisational cultural impediments to increasing employee engagement. Myth three: The manager’s interactions with their direct-reports are the direct cause of low employee engagement: Half-truth, for there is a correlation between them,
Is talent management part of your strategic plan? With all the details involved in running a successful organisation, a leader can get overwhelmed at times. Therefore, it is good to step back regularly and remind ourselves that there are only a few key result areas that need our attention to lead to organisational success. Regarding the human resource side of this equation, implementing a clear talent management pathway within your organisation that attracts, retains and develops top talent will always outperform like-for-like organisations by a significant difference. Dr. Jim Asplund, one of Gallup’s chief scientists states, that the best-led organisations know the direct path to individual, team, and organisational success starts with a key investment in their employees’ greatest talents. How are you investing in this area? Starting a Talent Management PathwayWhat is involved in a talent management pathway? Assuming you have your recruitment processes in order, where you are only getting top talent into the final interview and consistently onboarding A players (ask me how) then you need systems in place to track each employee’s current growth and developmental needs. Fortunately, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel on this. The heavy lifting has already been done, so it is just a matter of tapping into an existing resource. Harrison Assessments offers an online organisational dashboard, listing all employees, tracking their suitability alignment with their job role, along with their engagement in their work, and numerous other key metrics to assess existing talent and how to manage it. It
There is quite a bit of talk today about the need to have empowered employees within the workplace. Unfortunately that is often all it is – talk! But what are the benefits and how do you accomplish such a task? Let’s start by discussing the benefits of having more empowered team members. Business environments change so rapidly today. There is a need to develop more empowered employees in order to keep up with today‘s fast-paced fluctuating global environment. In order for organizations to remain adaptable to customer needs, front-line employees must be given more authority and flexibility to make on-the-spot decisions. Research in the area of empowerment has revealed that increased empowerment produces greater organisational success factors. These factors include employee contribution, innovation, organizational commitment, expands latent talents, increases capacity to accept change, and increases employee retention. These benefits are all necessary traits for improving organisational success. Having discussed some benefits and hence the desirability for greater empowerment let’s investigate what we mean by the term ‘empowerment’. There seems to be a plethora of definitions but for me the best way to discuss empowerment is to break it up into two dimensions. Hence, empowerment can be summed up by looking at both its internal and external aspects. The technical definitions that describes these two aspects are psychological empowerment (internal) and leader-empowering behaviours (external). Psychological empowerment is made up of four facets, a sense of real meaning in one’s work, a sense of making an impact through the contribution you make