Blanchard LeaderChat

A good performance management system is comprised of three parts: (1) performance planning, which consists of setting goals and objectives; (2) day-to-day coaching to help your people accomplish their goals; and (3) performance evaluation to examine individuals’ performance against goals during a certain period of time.

Unfortunately, the most important of these three parts is almost never done well in organizations: day-to-day coaching.

Coaching should take up 90 percent of your people management efforts. It’s through day-to-day coaching that you help your people monitor their progress and systematically move toward success.

In their new book, Coaching in Organizations: Best Coaching Practices from The Ken Blanchard Companies, authors Madeleine Blanchard and Linda Miller recommend a 4-step C-FAR process for managers looking to improve their performance and development conversations.

• Connect by building rapport and setting the context.
• Focus by identifying topics and goals to be discussed.
• Activate your conversation by determining strategy and tactics for specific goals.
• Review by recapping the discussion to ensure clear agreements.

You can learn more about the 4-step C-FAR process at our archived webinar homepage.  In particular check out Linda Miller’s presentation on Moving Forward during Uncertain Times: The Power of Coaching.  Linda discusses

• The four parts of a coaching conversation
• The four coaching skills
• How to support your team so that team members are motivated to move forward and take intentional action

We just published the latest installment in our ongoing research on employee passion.  The focus of this latest paper was to look at the process people go through in deciding whether their current company deserves their full commitment or just enough to get by.

We found out something really interesting to keep in mind as organization’s look at ways to create a more motivating environment for their employees.  It’s not necessarily what’s happening in the work environment that you need to focus on.  It’s how individual employees perceive it.

Let me give you an example.  Recognition is one of the eight factors that we have identified as a component of a motivating work environment.  (It’s also ranked notoriously low in the surveys we’ve conducted.)  How would you go about meeting the recognition needs of the people in your organization? 

You might decide the answer was to create some sort of company-wide recognition process culminating in an employee of the month award. You implement the program, but are later disappointed when you find out that the Recognition scores on the latest employee satisfaction survey haven’t budged at all. 

The problem? Recognition means different things to different people.  For some people, recognition means choice assignments, extra compensation, or maybe a small perk like movie tickets.  For others it just means some heartfelt thanks from an immediate supervisor for a job well done.

The same holds true for all of the eight factors, which in addition to Recognition include Meaningful Work, Autonomy, Collaboration, Connectedness to Colleagues and Leaders, Fairness, and Career Growth. 

As you think about ways to create a motivating work environment, don’t forget that the best approach is an individual approach. Make sure that any new policies, procedures, and strategies are the things that people really want. 

Chris Edmonds, our senior consulting partner who presented Revitalizing the Downsized Organization last week once told me, “Without a behavioral definition of values, confusion reigns when staff members try to hold each other accountable.”

In other words, people need to see an example of the kind of behavior that’s expected of them at work.  Without it, there’s too much room for individual interpretation.  While each of us may have an individual interpretation of what honesty, openness, and responsibility means, what’s really important is how the organization defines it.  And even more important is to provide people with living examples (read senior leaders) who walk the talk of the organization’s values.

As an example, Chris showed me how one large Fortune 500 company defined “Integrity” in their organization:

We work with customers and prospects openly, honestly and sincerely. When we say we will do something, we will do it; when we say we cannot or will not do something, then we won’t do it.

Think for a moment about what the senior executives in this organization would look like.  What would they be doing?  How would they run meetings? How would they manage direct reports?  How would they interact with customers?

It’s important to get a clear picture of what the behavior that goes along with this definition looks like.  Without it, you don’t have a clear set of behaviors that you can hold people accountable to.  And when that happens, you’re setting yourself up for trouble down the road.  Just ask the customers, investors, and employees of Enron—the former Fortune 500 company mentioned above.

Recently, the media has been reporting on more upbeat economic news.  The general feeling is that we are starting to see some improvement in the business environment.  

What does the economy look like from your perspective? Are things improving, getting worse, or staying about the same?  Take a minute and share your thoughts in our new poll below.

What’s the best way for leaders to impact their organizations after a layoff, merger, or acquisition?  If you had to choose between focusing on your people, financials, or customers, where would you begin?  We asked that question to 700 frontline, mid-level, and senior executives who attended our webinar on Revitalizing the Downsized Organization this past Tuesday. 

Their response?  Focus on your people first. 

52% said addressing employee motivation needs should be the first order of business, followed by customer needs (14%), and then financials (12%). 

How does this stack up with your priorities during these trying economic times? It’s important to have a strong strategic focus on financials when money is tight, but make sure that you are also paying attention to employee needs.  After all, you need their best ideas and their best work now, more than ever.

Great organizations know that focusing on people—both customers and employees—is just as important as measuring the success of the bottom line.

Are you taking care of the people who take care of your customers?

Looking to be a little more coach-like in your conversations?  In their new book, Coaching in Organizations: Best Coaching Practices from The Ken Blanchard Companies, authors Madeleine Homan and Linda Miller recommend a 4-step process for managers looking to improve the basic structure of their performance and development conversations.

• Connect by building rapport and setting the context. The manager needs to take a minute from other things that they may be working on to give employee’s their full attention. This may sound simple, yet any manager knows that it isn’t always easy to turn away from the computer screen, tune out the phone, and be fully attentive.
• Focus by identifying topics and goals to be discussed. In this phase the manager needs to be sure that he or she has confirmed the specific focus of the conversation. This may seem obvious, but most conversations require refocusing a surprising average of seven times.
• Activate your conversation by determining strategy and tactics for specific goals. To activate effectively, a manager must speak simply and directly. The key is for the person being coached to be crystal clear about which actions he or she is committed to and why.
• Review by recapping the discussion to ensure clear agreements. In this final phase (which is missing from most conversations), the manager needs to make sure that clear agreements with timelines are in place.

Join Blanchard Senior Consulting Partner Chris Edmonds today for a live online chat beginning at 10:05 a.m. Pacific Time.

Chris will be stopping by The Ken Blanchard Companies’ LeaderChat blog (www.leaderchat.org) for a 50-minute Q&A session right after he finishes his WebEx webinar presentation on Revitalizing the Downsized Organization. Over 500 people will be participating in the webinar and many will be gathering at the Blanchard blog to ask follow-up questions.

If you have a question that you would like to ask Chris, just enter this thread or click on the COMMENTS hyperlink near the title of this post.  Type in your question in the space provided and hit SUBMIT COMMENT.  Chris will answer as many questions as possible until he has to leave at 11:00 a.m. Pacific.

And if you can’t stay, be sure to stop by later and see all the questions that were asked.  Or better yet, hit the RSS FEED button on the right-hand column and receive updates on a daily basis.

The debate between what’s better for company’s experiencing a downturn in sales, layoffs or pay cuts, continues to draw differing opinions.  In today’s US edition of The Wall Street Journal, columnist Cari Tuna reports that while 65% of companies resort to lay offs when faced with economic short falls, a growing percentage are choosing mandatory furloughs and pay cuts as an alternative. 

What are the deciding factors in determining which path to follow? It all depends on how you see the future unfolding. 

If you “don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel, it just makes sense to lay off less productive workers,” says Satish Deshpande, a management professor at Western Michigan University’s Haworth College of Business. 

Other workplace experts believe that pay cuts and mandatory furloughs are the better choice if you believe a sales decline will be temporary.

Which route would you choose?  It probably depends on your outlook for the future.

If you’ve already had to make some changes in compensation or structure because of the economy, be sure to check out our free webinar tomorrow on Revitalizing the Downsized Organization.  Senior Consulting Partner Chris Edmonds will be sharing some hands-on management strategies for keeping everyone focused, productive, and optimistic as we ride out this downturn.

For more on this debate, check out our earlier post on January 30, Layoffs or Pay Cuts: How would you decide?

Eventually, it all boils down to one question.  What are you going to do differently?  For an organizational change plan to work, it has to be driven down to the individual level.  Until it does, it remains only a dream.

I was reminded about that as I was staring at a blank Personal Action Card at the end of a day-long planning meeting.  Three hundred employees had just finished a four-hour strategy session to identify ways to decrease costs and increase revenues and now we were individually being asked to commit to four things:

1. What can I do to save money?
2. What can I do to support company growth?
3. What can I do to help someone in another department or workgroup?
4. What can I do to help myself?  

I was surprised at how much trouble I was having at this critical moment in the process.  Earlier in the day I had been very active with ideas on what the organization could do to cut costs and increase revenues, but now that it had gotten to a personal level, I was struggling.

Have you driven your organizational change down to the individual level?  Are people ready to change?  Have they committed to a new course of action?  It’s not really going to happen until they do.

Giving feedback is a critical job responsibility of any manager, but it can be a scary proposition for many people. Madeleine Blanchard, co-founder of Coaching Services at The Ken Blanchard Companies says that with a little bit of practice using a coaching style approach it will get less uncomfortable. Remember that as a manager you earn the right to give feedback by building trust and respect. Here are eight ways to give better feedback:

1. Before giving feedback, be sure that there were clear agreements about goals, norms, roles, and expectations established.  
2. Make sure that the relationship has sufficient trust. Ask for permission to give feedback, or at least prepare the direct report if you need to share something that might be delicate or hard to hear. 
3. Use a neutral demeanor to eliminate blame and judgment. Be aware of your nonverbal communication and tone. Practice using neutral language if this is a challenge.  
4. Be timely and give feedback immediately or as quickly as possible, but not in the heat of the moment. If you cannot control your emotions, wait until you can before giving feedback. 
5. Be relevant. Feedback needs to be focused on moving forward, not about something in past that will never happen again. Giving feedback about past events which are unlikely to recur serves no purpose and can damage trust.  
6. Focus on behaviors that are within the employee’s control. Beating people up for things outside of their control is unreasonable. 
7. Be specific and descriptive. Describe the behaviors or data rather than giving generalizations. Do not drag in third-party observations and do not give into demands for “what other people think.” Remember you are the manager, and what matters is what you think. 
8. Be open and ready for a variety of outcomes. If you are just giving feedback to be helpful, don’t expect gratitude or enthusiasm. If there is a request, hopefully, the feedback will be received and acted upon. If so, pay attention to efforts and be ready to endorse and praise. If there is a demand and/or requirement that needs to be acted upon, be ready to work with the person to ensure compliance. Be ready to discuss structure (when and how they will do what is needed), accountability (how you and others will know they are on track) and support (how you and others can help). Finally, be ready to follow up with consequences for failure.