The best people are always underpaid and the worst people overpaid. – Richard Koch
Over the years, I’ve found that many people settle for being mediocre at their jobs. According to Richard Koch, author of The 80/20 Principle, mediocrity is rampant. The 80/20 principle is based on statistical analysis that you can measure anything and find that 80 percent of the results are produced by 20 percent of the effort. Continue Reading…
As a manager, it’s easy to pigeonhole your employees. You’ve seen them all in action–the leaders, the workers, the slackers, the confused, the wannabes, and the nobodies. People will eventually play into stereotypes that you’ve created. Constantly reminding people of their bad habits and crowing about how you might as well do it yourself isn’t very effective either.
“Search others for their virtues, thyself for thy vices.” – Benjamin Franklin
One of the main reasons people change jobs hasn’t changed since the time of old Benjamin Franklin. People often leave good employment opportunities simply because they don’t like their immediate supervisor. Since turnover is costly and unproductive, rethinking your expectations as well as how you interact with your employees might benefit everybody.
Take a moment and step outside of your spotlight. How does your team see you and how does it help your organization?
Start by considering each of your employees as a unique person with the potential to become great at his or her job. If you let them know know that you are expecting greatness, it might actually happen. Another way in getting the most out of your team is to assure them that you are on their side. If you empathize with your team, you’ll develop a relationship of trust and understanding with them. When weakness rears its ugly head, your team will seek your counsel and try to work with you in order to get better, because they are seeking your approval. Who knows? They just might do it!
How are you currently building trust within your organization?
A real time player is not concerned about individual credit. Like a true leader, he or she knows that they would not have deserved the credit without the other team members input. And a true leader knows that the credit will come in the long run… that having been part of a successful team will put him in line to be on other successful teams, or earn a promotion, or simply make him or her more valuable when it comes to looking for new objectives.
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. – Harry Truman
It’s hard not to care who gets the credit. And even though it takes everyone’s concentrated efforts to get the job done, you need to feel positive about your work even on those occasions when just a few get the credit that perhaps the whole team deserved.
Together Everybody Achieves More
A good team leader will make sure to credit the whole team. When announcing results of a team’s efforts, the leader will emphasize how hard the team worked together, and what each employee contributed to the bigger effort. Don’t worry about team members who didn’t work as hard as they might have or that others might have wanted them to–they will be penalized when they are not picked for a new team. It doesn’t matter once the team’s work is done; it matters for the next time around.
How do you make it known who gets credit when credit is due?
Seth Godin could not have said it any better when he said: “We run our schools like factories. We line kids up in a straight rows, put them in batches (called grades), and work very hard to make sure there are no defective parts. Nobody standing out, falling behind, running ahead, making a rukus.”
I absolutely love, love, love this quote! Now, don’t get me wrong…while learning the basics is important, it’s just as important to discover new and creative ways of doing the same old things. The real route to success is a combination of learning and creative thinking…not by conforming to the norm.
In his book, Purple Cow, Seth Godin’s message is quite simple: Be Remarkable. A purple cow is something counterintuitive, phenomenal, and exciting. His lesson is to put a purple cow into your business thinking, whether you are in marketing, production, or sales, so that you will attract the attention you deserve!
If you always follow the manual, it’s time to change your mindset. Creativity needs to be nurtured, and it’s hard to do so in an environment saturated by “business-as-usual” politics (this irks me…a lot), as well as disruptions of streaming e-mails and phone calls. To put yourself in a mindset that will encourage you to think outside the box, make an effort to tune out the outside world. And instead of just doing your job, give some thought on how you can do it differently. This way you just may change your organization, product, or service in such a way that nobody ever thought before.
A leader set up a team to look at the way an organization responded to public requests and concerns. The team consisted of mentors involved in various functions of customer service. The leader studied the way his team worked and decided that the average time to handle feedback requests could be reduced from 72 to 24 hours by eliminating certain steps. At the first team meeting, he outlined the purpose and goal of the team, then presented his findings and asked the team to come up with a plan to reduce the turnaround time on requests and concerns.
The team responded by saying, “What do you need us for? It looks like you’ve done it all yourself.”
Maintaining results is about getting commitment, everyone’s commitment. Involving people at the end of a process isn’t going to impact much on buy-in. In order to manage continued job performance, get the team involved fast and often. The extent of their contribution might rest on their experience and insight, which you can develop and facilitate. Start fast, do always and you are leading in a team effort way. To get to commitment, flex your approach in contributing, collaborating, communicating and challenging within each of the roles of the leader.
