Blanchard LeaderChat

The New Year is almost upon us. This time of year is one of hope and positivity. Regardless of whether you feel you had a great year or a down year, there should be excitement that the New Year will be more prosperous than the one that preceded it. So as 2011 comes to a close, here are three simple steps to put you in a positive frame of mind to kick off 2012 on the right foot.

The Three R’s of New Year’s

1. Revolutions – Circle back and review the resolutions you set for yourself last year. Furthermore, circle back and review any other important non-resolution goals you set for yourself last year. And while you’re at it, circle back and review any other big accomplishments from the past year – include wins AND losses that provided vital learning opportunities.
2. Revelations – Celebrate your successes! So often we get hung up on not fully achieving our resolutions and goals that we fail to realize just how much positive progress we’ve actually made towards them. This is especially true of resolutions which, for most people, tend to be extreme stretch goals. Don’t forget, they’re called “stretch” goals for a reason. For example, if last year you set out to lose 20 pounds but ended up only losing 10 pounds, you’ve still made positive progress worth celebrating. Be proud of the progress you’ve made toward your goals and celebrate what you have achieved, don’t dwell on what you haven’t achieved.
3. Resolutions – Now that you’ve reviewed and celebrated, it’s time to reset. Build off of what you’ve learned from reviewing the past year to determine how you can improve your approach and move closer to achieving (or fully achieve) your goals. When crafting your resolutions for the coming year, make sure that they’re authentic and meaningful to you. There’s a great post on this over at the PsychCentral blog offering 9 Tips for Setting Authentic New Year’s Resolutions.

As the year draws to a close, make sure not to skip steps 1 and 2 before crafting your resolutions. It’s important to review all of the valuable lessons you’ve learned and to celebrate all of your successes. You’ll be amazed at the great year you might not have realized you had! These two additional steps will put you in a positive state of mind and help set the tone for you to develop more meaningful, authentic, AND attainable resolutions.

Congratulations on all that you accomplished in 2011, and best wishes for an even more prosperous 2012!

Adam Morris is a featured blogger at Why Lead Now, one of LeaderChat’s sister blogs, focusing on the next generation of leaders. Follow Adam on Twitter @adammorris21.

A new white paper from The Ken Blanchard Companies shows that poor leadership is costing the average company an amount equal to 7% of their annual revenue. That’s over a million dollars a year for any organization with $15 million dollars or more in annual sales.

 The three big culprits? 

1. Employee turnover.  Poor leadership is responsible for up to 30% of the reasons why people leave their organizations according to exit interviews conducted by The Saratoga Institute.
2. Customer turnover. Poor leadership negatively impacts employee satisfaction, which in turn negatively impacts customer satisfaction and retention. Research published in Harvard Business Review calculated that every 5 point change in employee satisfaction scores caused a 1.3 point change in customer satisfaction scores.
3. Employee productivity.  Poor leadership leads to poor employee productivity.  Research from Blanchard shows that direct report productivity can be improved 5-12% through better management practices. 

Most senior executives instinctively know that leadership impacts the bottom line, but quantifying that impact has been a challenge in the past.  This new white paper (and the free online calculator that the information is drawn from) is a great way for leaders to put some facts behind their suspicions. 

You can download a copy of this new white paper, Making the Business Case for Leadership Development: The 7% Differential here.  If you are interested in calculating what poor leadership practices might be costing your organization, also check out Blanchard’s free online Cost of Doing Nothing Calculator.  This is the same free online calculator used by survey respondents in the white paper.

Recently I was channel surfing while watching TV and I ran across a showing of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour. Larry the Cable Guy was one of the featured performers, and if you’ve seen his act before, you know his signature catch-phrase is “Git R Done!” Now, normally I wouldn’t recommend listening to Larry the Cable Guy for advice on building trust in relationships, but it struck me that if you’re a leader known as someone who can “Git-R-Done,” the chances are you’re considered a trustworthy individual.

Trust in relationships is comprised of four elements: Ability, Believability, Connectedness, and Dependability (TrustWorks!® ABCD Model). Part of being an able, competent leader is knowing how to get things done. Yet with today’s flat organizations and wide span of control, it’s impossible for a leader to know the answer to every problem that crops up.

Read more…

“Money”…”Clutch”…”Nails”…Maybe you’ve used (or heard) one of those phrases to describe someone who seems to deliver when it matters most. It’s the go-to person that everyone trusts to get the job done on time, on budget, and with good quality. Why do those people engender so much trust from others? It’s pretty simple, right? They produce results!

We rarely have the conscious thought of building trust when we go about our daily jobs, but the fact is that our track record of results, or the lack thereof, contributes dramatically to how much we’re trusted by others. One of the quickest ways to erode trust with people is to not be productive in your role and provide positive contributions to your team and organization. Read more…

What is the gap between current and desired performance, costing your organization on an annual basis?   A lot more than you might think going by the results of people who got a sneak peek of The Ken Blanchard Companies’ new Cost of Doing Nothing Calculator at the ASTD International Conference last week in Washington, DC.

In most cases, the size of this gap was over $1 million dollars in companies with 200 or more employees.

The Cost of Doing Nothing Calculator uses a couple of pieces of information—number of employees, annual sales, current turnover rate, and combines it with desired targets for customer satisfaction and employee productivity to generate a “cost of doing nothing” dollar amount.  It’s a great tool for identifying the impact of better leadership in an organization and also making the business case for a training initiative—especially leadership development.

Are you interested in calculating what your current cost of doing nothing is?  Just click here and follow the easy 3-step process.  It’s free, it only takes minutes to complete, and you get access to a complete personalized report immediately.

One of the biggest challenges that organizations face is how to improve coordination among team members. While most teams are aligned to some degree, they are often not aligned to the degree that they could be. Check this out in your own organization. Ask individual team members independently what the top three strategic imperatives are for their team. If you hear a wide variety of answers, you will know that team members are not as closely aligned behind a common vision as they could be.

When people are not aligned behind a compelling vision there is a risk that people will “check out” or end up “spinning their wheels.” Checking out occurs when people do not see how their work contributes to anything larger. When work is perceived as having little significance, it is common for people to disengage and resign themselves to low impact work that requires just enough effort to get by.

Spinning your wheels happens when people double their effort but don’t get any traction. These people are working hard but it is unclear how their work is contributing to the direction the group is heading. When this occurs, people experience false starts, have to redo work, or discover that others have already done the same work.

A clear vision and goal setting helps in both of these cases. When people can see where the larger group is heading and why heading that way is important, they can begin to work in the same direction. Instead of wasting their time on low impact projects—or redoing work that misses the mark—they can focus on high impact areas that directly contribute to shared goals and subsequently improve the company’s bottom line.

Join Blanchard consultants Jim Atwood and Alan Youngblood at The Ken Blanchard Companies LeaderChat blog beginning at 10:05 a.m. Pacific Time for a 50-minute Q&A session. 

Jim and Alan will be stopping by right after they finish their WebEx webinar on Keeping People Focused and Productive during Uncertain Times.  Over 400 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 Jim or Alan, 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.  Jim and Alan will answer as many questions as possible until they have 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.

New managers need to get in the habit of giving constant feedback.  That’s the message I got from Madeleine Blanchard (formerly Homan) as we prepared for her upcoming webinar on More Survival Skills for First Year Managers. 

You have to give feedback in the moment and you have to be comfortable with giving clear direction if that is what is needed.  New managers need to be able to say, “Maybe I wasn’t clear, or maybe there was some kind of misunderstanding, but it needs to go this way and you have to be incredibly clear with your direction.”

A big fear for new managers is that feedback will be perceived as being too critical and actually de-motivate the employee causing performance to decline even more. The opposite is true. Without proper feedback the employee will not have the information they need to perform better. This makes learning how to give productive feedback essential for new managers. 

For new managers looking to have more success with their feedback, Madeleine recommends four best practices:  

1. Before giving feedback, be sure that there were clear agreements about goals, norms, roles, and expectations.
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. Focus on behaviors that are within the employee’s control. Beating people up for things outside of their control is unreasonable.
4. Be specific and descriptive. Describe the behaviors or data rather than giving generalizations.

Giving feedback is a critical job responsibility of any new manager. It doesn’t have to be scary, and when done well it can provide the coaching, support, and resources people need to achieve the goals that have been set. 

A lot of clients have been asking us to help them with positioning training in their companies.  Tight budgets have put restrictions on travel and any expenditure that doesn’t immediately impact the bottom line.  Training budgets have been especially hard hit in companies that mostly see training as long-term skill development that you do when you have extra time and money—which is certainly not the situation today in most organizations.

It got me thinking about who needs training.  If training is just for training’s sake, the answer is probably no one.  But if it is training designed to help people be more productive on the job, serve customers better, or impact the bottom line in some way, then that’s a different story.

So who in your company needs to be more focused and productive?  Who could benefit from managers better able to prioritize work, manage expectations, and provide support?  There are probably a number of people depending on the situation your company is in.

In any of these three situations, training can help your organization immediately, and also position it for new growth in the future as the economy improves.