Formium Development team believe in a strength-based leadership approach. Leaders should concentrate on developing strengths instead of fixing weaknesses. Practicing a positive approach will likely help you and your organisation to become a lot more authentic and also more effective. Read our most-liked quotes on strengths:
What’s your favourite quote on strengths? Share with the online community in the comment section, or tweet us your favourite quote @FormiumLtd!
When I talk to managers and leaders, the theme of high performance is a frequent topic of conversation. We can all agree that being an excellent organisation and delivering exceptional products or services are very important, but does everyone we work with know what we actually mean by excellence in the day-to-day?
6 methods to set obvious expectations for high performance
Too often, managers seem to lead through mental telepathy. Without clearly communicated expectations– in terms of standards or the milestones against which we analyze our progress – team members may not know what to do and how to do it. This can result in uncertainty, undermining effective teamwork, initiative and productivity.
Properly setting expectations for employees or team members is a critical dimension in quality workplaces, according to a large research of managers undertaken in the 1990s by The Gallup Organization. Underneath are a few ideas on setting clear expectations that will set standards for excellence and outcomes.
1. Begin with creating a compelling goal. Describe and explain what you want the end result to look like. Not just what you want done, but the purpose and the results you want to achieve when the project is finished and the responsibility of everyone in its achievement. People want to know that their job, whether large or small, makes a difference.
2. Talk about what you mean by “excellent performance”. This step is needed to make the vision ‘actionable’ and translate it into tangible performance measures. Set metrics where possible, paint a complete picture of the requirements you are expecting. Refer to your performance review form or competency framework for behavioural standards.
3. Concentrate on the required outcomes, instead of on the exact steps you want your people to take. Think of this as coaching rather than controlling. Encouraging your people to design their own way of delivering positive outcomes allows each team member to use their strengths to their fullest potential.
4. Provide regular feedback. The yearly appraisal or performance review is insufficient and often too late to let staff members know how and whether they are meeting your expectations. Give feedback along the road: define the context, refer to the vision and give your reasons for the feedback. Next plan for a way forward, ask for more or less of what you observed. Take a coaching, rather than disciplinarian approach. The more two-way communication, the greater the clarity around the expectations.
5. Give positive encouragement. Until you are particularly experienced at giving feedback, don’t use the ‘sandwich’ of positive– constructive– positive comments. As Ken Blanchard suggest in One Minute Manager, catch employees doing things right and you’ll get even more of it.
6. Give people the flexibility to perform well. As soon as the expectations are clear get out of the way and let people to meet them. Having set clear standards, milestones or due dates, every member of your team will have the ability to track their own progress, check whether they are meeting the milestones and behavioural standards. This approach also allow individuals be accountable for delivering their own work, so that they can course correct where needed or stay on track to make their full contribution.
To find out more about Positive Leadership view our webinar.
In today’s fast changing environment agility and the ability to make change effectively is a key organisational requirement. According to research many change management initiatives fail, risking employee’s resistance and change fatigue.
View this webinar recording to explore:
• The key change management mistakes to avoid
• Successful approaches to effectively leading change
• How to minimise resistance, engage and motivate your people
• Positive change management methodologies
10 leadership actions to help your team flourish
1. Develop a team that is made up of people with different experiences and strengths. Successful teams are diverse, with a wide range of complementary strengths; each person performing in the role that plays to their strengths and in which they can thrive. This approach makes the most of the combined talents available to you, allows most individual weaknesses to become irrelevant, as they are compensated by the strengths of others. Diversity of perspectives is crucial for innovation.
2. Involve your team in co-creating an aspirational vision, so members have a clear stake in the organisation’s success. Seeking your people’s views generates immediate engagement and a stronger connection between activity and outcome.
3. Talk about “why” as well as “what”. Foster the team’s shared aim by describing the impact of their work so that members understand the link to a greater purpose. There is a stakeholder, a customer, or even society at large that benefits as an end result of the work they’re doing.
4. As part of planning and managing challenges, identify and communicate a clear outcome. Review past similar successes and identify the factors of that success. You can then use these to shape your response to issues.
5. Specify and agree clear metrics and targets and agree shared performance outcomes. This establishes each person as responsible for their own performance, seeing growth opportunities, owning mistakes, and setting and reporting against their own SMART objectives. This investment of time benefits the leader by allowing you to spend less of your time spent on ongoing monitoring.
6. Discuss performance at all levels, all the time. This means the organisation’s performance, the team’s performance, customer responses, and individual contributions and actions. All of these elements contribute to the outcome, satisfaction, and experience.
7. Take the role of facilitator, rather than team manager. Ensure that you give thinking time and space to staff members when discussing projects or challenges. They may need time to think issues through, explore options, or identify likely obstacles.
8. Create successful team conversations by encouraging positive communication. The ratio of positivity to negativity is a fundamental driver of good relationships as well as productivity. A successful team looks to have between three and six positive statements for every negative statement, expressing more agreement, and engaging with others’ viewpoints. Successful teams also listen more than argue – they spend more time seeking to understand rather than asserting their own point.
9. Use “Yes AND…” rather than “Yes BUT…” in discussions and meetings. This indicates that you’ve heard the other person’s point, and allows you to build on the previous statement. It is a small language tweak, which generates collaboration, rather than argument.
10. Expect accountability and at the same time practice visible forgiveness to defuse blame when things do go wrong. This will allow you to move on to resolve issues and safeguards the team’s willingness to try new things, take risks, make mistakes and learn. Apologising and showing forgiveness are some of the most important ways of building trust, and encouraging open communication.
If we can support the development of your team, look at our organisation development offer or contact us.
Exceptional leaders hardly ever stop learning, they know they can always improve themselves. Twitter is a great resource for thoughts, ideas and good examples. Here are just some of the top influencers that we follow and retweet on leadership skills or company culture. Check out our selection:
Through Alison Green’s Ask a Manager profile you can ask her a question like ‘this is what my boss says, what does it mean?’ Send her your questions or learn from others’ cases.
Based in London, David Shepherd tweets tweets about Human Resources, employment law, pay, benefits, the labour market, data services, b2b media, and a whole lot more.
Aadil
Bandukwala is a social recruiting consultant with a history in Talent Acquisition and Social Media. Worth your while following him if you want to know everything about recruiting.
Lolly Daskal’s Twitter feed is about coaching, management, leadership, consulting. You can find truly informative posts, inspirational quotes and pictures shared by her.
Dan McCarthy
, self-described leadership and management development geek. His profile has everything that has to do with leadership and management.
Who is missing from our list? Let us know in the comments below!
A summary of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In
Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Facebook, presented a TED Talk on why are there so few women in leadership positions. Her book, Lean In started from that 15 minute talk. Sandberg’s argument is that excuses and justifications will not get women anywhere. In her book she provides useful suggestions to urge women to take their place in the working world while taking ownership of a leadership concept. Women have to take a seat at the table, even if they feel uneasy at first, says Sandberg.
They have to lean in and have the will to lead. She says women have to break with internalised attitudes that hold them back. Throughout the book, Sandberg carefully weighs the double binds, internal and external, that hold back women from achieving their goals, their potential at the workplace.
Sandberg’s work is a combination of hard data, academic research, her own experiences, observations and life lessons with a hint of humour. Lean In is more than a book, it’s kind of a feminist manifesto as she calls it; part of a movement to create a more equal world.
The book is available at amazon.co.uk and amazon.com.
Agi Galgoczi
Does culture matter? Recent research carried out by James Heskett at Harvard Business School suggests that 20%-30% of corporate performance can be attributed to a positive, strong performance culture. As Edgar Schein, probably the most prolific and oft-quoted researcher and author in the area of culture, suggested: “The only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture. If you do not manage culture, it manages you and you may not even be aware of the extent to which this is happening.”
High performance cultures embrace innovation and empower people to contribute to that innovation. They espouse values on taking calculated risks, being innovative, being supportive, and being a learning organisation. Amanda Whittaker Brown of IDeA identified four specific signs of a performance culture and a culture where high performance is an integral part of how the organisation works:
There are three specific actions leaders can take to create a high performance culture in their organisation:
1. Co-create the desired culture
Involve others in designing and shaping the team or organisational culture. In order for you to be able to identify and articulate what a desired culture would be, you need to understand and be able to communicate the vision for the organisation, its purpose and how individuals and teams can contribute. Your team need to be able to understand the difference that they are making.
Once the vision for the organisation or the team is clear, consider whether the current culture, norms, and behaviours serve it, or whether you need to make some changes. Talk to your team, customers, senior management or board about how they see those objectives and aims being delivered, what your core values are and what type of underlying culture is need.
Invite your colleagues and stakeholders to co-create the desired culture through conversation. Identify what works well and where changes are needed to enhance individual and organisational performance. Teams and staff can take part in this conversation and feel ownership and accountability, which in turns underpins a performance culture.
Once you have identified the desired culture, make sure that you are modelling, not just communicating new values and behaviours. If you’re asking other people to change, you need to remember that that will require quite a significant change on your part as well. Agree and describe what high performance looks like, agree how people will work and behave as part of the culture.
2. Replace a culture of blame with empowerment and accountability
Develop a culture of empowerment instead of blame, which stifles innovation and creativity. Enable people to take responsibility, to make decisions, to take action. At an organisational level, empowerment is supported by management commitment and relatively few layers of hierarchy. It’s important that people are supported with the right skills so they can take advantage of empowerment. Provide development on teamwork, communication skills, decision making, and risk management or other appropriate areas.
Ensure that your team has clarity of objectives and corporate priorities and that they are rewarded for doing the right things. Accept mistakes and ensure that people learn from their mistakes.
Accountability is equally important. It’s not quite enough, from a cultural perspective, for people to be accountable to you because you’re their boss. They actually need to be accountable to each other, so they can say, “We each understand what everyone else’s role is and we each commit to delivering our individual role for the benefit of the team.”
3. Set high expectations and enable people to meet those expectations
Maurizio Freda, Estee Lauder CEO said: “You need super talented people who know they need to do fantastically well. When your leadership team takes the same attitude, you create a culture where each one can give his or her best. In particular, you have to find the strengths of each individual in the organisation and then you can create magic.”
Choose people with lots of potential who have some of the strengths that you’re looking for, and allow them to play to their strengths.
Provide a combination of high support and high challenge. Set the expectation that people have to do well in this organisation, that you are aiming for excellence and that you trust that people can meet these expectation as they are supported and set up for success. People can meet those high expectations because they get to play to their strengths, they get the development that they need, and if they make mistakes these are looked at as learning opportunities.
These three leadership activities help you embody Schein’s statement that “Leaders are the main designers and builders of an organisation’s culture.”
Eszter Molnar Mills is a strength-based leadership and organisation development specialist and founder of Formium Development. A qualified executive and team coach, she helps organisations and individuals reach enhanced performance by reflecting on what works, and developing skills and strategies for improvement. Through team coaching and facilitation Eszter also helps organisations and teams work together to develop positive and productive cultures.
We believe that great leaders are made not born. We have brought together a list of 5 thought-provoking blogs which can give you ideas to develop your skills and guidance on your leadership journey.
1. Lead
ership Freak: Dan Rockwell empowers you in 300 words daily. Enjoyable and makes you think, reading this blog could become an important part of your daily routine.
2. Dr Wayne W Dyer: If you wo
uld like to focus on your personal leadership or self- development, this blog could give you some great tips and ways to motivate yourself.
3. Tanveer Naseer: Th
is blog’s main focus is on helping managers to improve their leadership and team management skills, helping them identify the fulfilling purpose of their work.
4. Management Excellence: Art Petty’s blog focuses on developing leadership skills by concentrating on professional presence. Critical thinking is also a central theme on this site.
5. Three Star Leadership: This blog is aimed at leaders at all levels. Tips, lists, strategies to help managers to perform at a higher level.
We could not complete this round-up without including Gordon Tredgold‘s leadership blog. Hear more from Gordon in our interview.