Another interesting read from my daily Bible reading.
The first churches were started by a bunch of common men and women who loved Jesus and loved seeing people meet Jesus. Their success wasn’t based on their position or their training, but on their passion.
Attitudes are contagious. One thing I love about the team I serve with is that being around them and discussing church, ministry and life in general, stirs my passion for what I do.
If you read through the book of Acts, Paul had a team of people who worked with him to try and accomplish a vision that was larger than he could have ever imagined. Any great leader knows you cannot persevere without great people.
An excellent leader will always persevere because they are not trying to do what they are doing alone. They’ve built a team with people who understand they are valued, their opinions are not only welcomed but necessary, and the goal is the advancement of an organization—not the attention of an individual.
You know you have the right team when you don’t just love the work you do, you love the people you do it with. You know you have the right team when problems do not belong to “me” but rather they belong to “we!” You know you have the right team when the people you lead love you and the organization too much to allow team members to make a ridiculous decision.
The right team will refuse to allow personal preferences to dictate decisions and will embrace uncomfortable conversations. The right team will bring people in when making a decision that directly impacts their area, understanding that this does not slow down the process, but speeds it up, because people are way more likely to buy into a decision when they’ve had input.
What’s Next:
Do you have the right people around you? People who would stick with you no matter what the circumstances?
Is there anything about your attitude that you don’t want to pass to your team? What steps can you take this week to set the tone for the people you lead?
If someone special comes over for dinner, you don’t start pulling the leftovers out of the fridge. You go all out to give them your absolute best.
God gave us His very best when He sent Jesus to the cross, and God calls us to give our best to Him as well.
I once heard a football player say, “the separation is in the preparation.” The reason his team was winning was because they prepared the best they could for each game. What set them apart from other teams wasn’t their facilities or their skill, but their preparation.
The same is true for us. The separation between good and great organizations is the preparation people are willing to put into doing the absolute best they can do. Organizations that anticipate great things prepare for greater things.
Sitting around wanting something great for yourself, your company, or your church is not a bad thing; in fact, it can be the fuel that sets the vision in your heart on fire. However, many times it’s not a lack of vision that holds us back from achieving maximum potential, but rather our lack of execution.
There will never be a day when we don’t have a next step to take in our walk with Jesus or in our roles as leaders. We don’t have to be perfect, but we should work hard, learn as much as we can, and THEN trust God to make up the difference.
We cannot effectively lead people long term if we are not dedicated to increasing our leadership capacity. As long as we are learning, we are growing. When you stop growing as a leader, you begin dying as one.
We have no other talent pool to take from. We have no other pool to select successors for key positions in your company. In the next few years, we will only have the Millennial pool to pick and develop talent from.
When it comes to Generation Y or Millennials, we have three choices:
1. We Villainize them. We choose to brand them as the corporate enemy refusing or incapable of doing things our way.
2. We Tolerate them. We choose to treat them as a necessary evil.
3. We Engage them. We adjust and develop them to be future leaders and managers.
Frankly, if we were to make sure that our company survives and even thrives after the Baby Boomers and Gen-X have left, then we only have option #3.
It is not easy and that is exactly why we developed a management development program called ‘Understanding and Managing Millennials”. The program, designed for supervisors and managers, is a combination of a one day classroom lecture with a 30 day on the job assignment and mentoring.
If your company has such Millennial challenges, then please have your assistant reach out to us. We will be more than happy to drop by and discuss the matter with you.
We also encourage you to read the article below.
11 Tips for Managing Millennials BY SUSAN M. HEATHFIELD
The millennials joining your workforce now are employees born between 1980 and 2000, or 1981 and 1999, depending on the source. Unlike the Gen-Xers and the Baby Boomers, the Millennials have developed work characteristics and tendencies from doting parents, structured lives, and contact with diverse people.
Millennials are used to working in teams and want to make friends with people at work. Millennial employees work well with diverse coworkers.
They grew up in an environment in which diverse children were the norm.
Millennials have a can-do attitude about tasks at work and look for feedback about how they are doing frequently—even daily and certainly weekly. Millennials want a variety of tasks and expect that they will accomplish every one of them. Positive and confident, millennials are ready to take on the world.
They seek leadership, and even structure, from their older and managerial coworkers, but expect that you will draw out and respect their ideas. Millennials seek a challenge and do not want to experience boredom. Used to balancing many activities such as teams, friends, and philanthropic activities, millennials want flexibility in scheduling and a life away from work.
Millennials need to see where their career is going and they want to know exactly what they need to do to get there. Millennials await their next challenge—and there better be a next challenge.
Millennials are the most connected generation in history and they will network right out of their current workplace if these diverse needs are not met. Computer experts, millennials are connected all over the world by email, instant messages, text messages, and the internet. Job searching, business contacts, and friends are just a couple of key taps away.
Know this because it really matters to millennials.
11 Tips for Millennial Management
1. Provide structure. Reports have monthly due dates. Jobs have fairly regular hours. Certain activities are scheduled every day. Meetings have agendas and minutes. Goals are clearly stated and progress is assessed. Define assignments and success factors. Millennials don’t need to be boxed in but they do need banks on their pond.
2. Provide leadership and guidance. Millennials want to look up to you, learn from you, and receive daily feedback from you. They want in on the whole picture and to know the scoop. Plan to spend a lot of time teaching and coaching and be aware of this commitment to millennials when you hire them. They deserve and want your very best investment of time in their success.
3. Encourage the millennial’s self-assuredness, “can-do” attitude, and positive personal self-image. Millennials are ready to take on the world. Their parents told them they can do it—and they can. Encourage—don’t squash them or contain them. They’re always looking to provide input and ideas. Encourage them to voice their thoughts and opinions.
4. Take advantage of the millennial’s comfort level with teams. Encourage them to join teams and provide a work environment that stresses teamwork. They are used to working in groups and teams. In contrast to the lone ranger attitude of earlier generations, millennials actually believe a team can accomplish more and better—they’ve experienced team success. Not just related to age, watch who joins the volleyball match at the company picnic. Millennials gather in groups and play on teams; you can also mentor, coach, and train your millennials as a team.
5. Listen to the millennial employee. Your millennial employees are used to loving parents who have scheduled their lives around the activities and events of their children. These young adults have ideas and opinions and don’t take kindly to having their thoughts ignored. After all, they had the best listening, the most child-centric audience in history.
6. Millennial employees are up for a challenge and change. Boring is bad. They seek ever-changing tasks within their work. What’s happening next is their mantra. Don’t bore them, ignore them, or trivialize their contribution.
7. Millennial employees are multi-taskers on a scale you’ve never seen before. Multiple tasks don’t phase them. Talk on the phone while doing email and answering multiple instant messages—yes! This is a way of life. In fact, without many different tasks and goals to pursue within the week, the millennials will likely experience boredom.
8. Take advantage of your millennial employee’s computer, cell phone, and electronic literacy. Are you a Boomer or even an early Gen-Xer? The electronic capabilities of these employees are amazing. You have a salesman in China? How’s the trip going? Old timers call and leave a message in his hotel room. Or, you can have your millennial text message him in his meeting for an immediate response. The world is wide, if not yet deep, for your millennial employees.
9. Capitalize on the millennial’s affinity for networking. Not just comfortable with teams and group activities, your millennial employee likes to network around the world electronically. Keep this in mind because they are able to post their resume electronically as well on web job boards viewed by millions of employers. They intermingle on sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn and rate your company at Glassdoor.com. Sought after employees, they are loyal, but they keep their options open—always.
10. Provide a life-work balanced workplace. Your millennials are used to cramming their lives with multiple activities. They may play on sports teams, walk for multiple causes, spend time as fans at company sports leagues, and spend lots of time with family and friends. They work hard, but they are not into the sixty hour work weeks defined by the Baby Boomers. Home, family, spending time with the children and families, are priorities. Don’t lose sight of this. Balance and multiple activities are important to these millennial employees. Ignore this at your peril.
11. Provide a fun, employee-centered workplace. Millennials want to enjoy their work. They want to enjoy their workplace. They want to make friends in their workplace. Worry if your millennial employees aren’t laughing, going out with workplace friends for lunch, and helping plan the next company event or committee. Help your long-term employees make room for the millennials.
By internet research counts, 75,000,000 millennials are joining the workforce—in 2015 they became the majority of your workers. These are desirable employees. Make your millennial employees happy in a fun, yet structured setting, and you are building the foundation for the superior workforce you desire. You are developing the workforce of your future.
As always, when characterizing a particular group of employees based on age, or any other special characteristic, some employees will fit this description; some employees will fit a part of this description; some employees will not fit this description at all.
Yet, if you heed these tips, you will steer your organization forward, more times than not, with a positive approach to managing your millennial employees.
Another way of looking at the old saying ‘Practice what you preach’ is ‘Practice what you learn.’ Far too often, we sit down in a classroom type training learning something new. However, we seldom put new-found knowledge into practice. This is such a waste of time, money, resource and opportunity to improve.
After returning to the Philippines five years ago, one glaring practice I noticed about training companies is that they have this ‘training hit & run’ approach. These training companies provide classroom training but fail to consider the sustainability of the lesson in real life. Such training companies do this either in a public workshop or in a more contained corporate training setting. Knowledge retention with such an approach is very low. People usually go back to business as usual and gradually forget what they learned.
AGMC, the company we set-up, has a different approach. After we conduct our ‘classroom training’ the learning process does not end there. Participants have an assignment to use what they learn in their day-to-day work. Three or four weeks after the classroom training, we reconvene and the participants share their experience using their new competencies.
Participants report on the work situation where the skill was used. They are also required to analyze the situation and report on their insights. It is only now, after the discussions, that they receive their certifications.
This is not a new approach to sustainable learning. It has been used abroad for some time now. Locally, when you take up a Lean Six Sigma program, the participant is required to have an actual work project proving the use of the lessons learned. They identify a challenging problem at work and use the tools and lessons they learned to fix the problem. The participant then proceeds and analyzes the financial benefits of the project and present/defend it to a panel. Only when they prove that they effectively used their newly acquired competency will they get their Lean Six Sigma Certification.
To all training companies back here. Let us design our programs as sustainable competency development programs and not as a one-shot deal. When a customer calls us again for a development program, it should be for a new competency. Getting a call to come back and re-train people for a competency that did not stick simply means we failed.
Entering the workplace can be intimidating for a first timer. Often, a new millennial employee would not know where to begin his or her journey. This is particularly worse if the company does not have a structured on-boarding program.
The first thing you ask for on your first day at work is for the on-boarding program. For the first time employees, the on-boarding program is a set of activities designed to get a newly hired person to quickly be productive in the workplace. This can include a brief background of the company, the key leaders, critical HR policies and procedures, walk-through on where to get information when needed, tour of the office and so on.
After the on-boarding has been accomplished, the very first question you ask your manager for is your latest job profile or job description. You need to read this very carefully as it narrates your job and the activities it entails. You need to clearly know what is expected from you. A former Citibank executive used to tell us “In order to do a good job, you first need to understand what is expected from you. Do not guess.” Ask your manager what he or she expects from you.
Start observing which of your colleagues actually deliver on their commitment and which ones are simply full of lip service. You need to stay away from the nay sayers or negative ones. These people will drain your energy with their negative vibes. Make sure you keep close to the high potential ones and get their help when needed.
Do not forget to dive into and understand your KPI’s and goals. You need to know how your performance will be measured at the end of the year. You need to understand what your goals are and plan how to reach them. Your ability to work as a team and deliver your goals has a big influence on your career in the company. It will also influence your pay scale and bonus.
Make sure you try and get along with everyone. At this point you will be feeling your way around the workplace and the last thing you need is someone who dislikes you. Let me make it very clear right now – no matter how bright you may think you are, you cannot win in the workplace if you are alone.
There you have it. Please feel free to pass this on to your friends and colleagues.
If there is one thing that a first-time manager or leader needs to comprehend deep in their heart is that we are only as good as our people. Jack Welch, one of the best management gurus, rightfully said that 80% of a great manager’s job is people.
A great manager spends most of his/her time interviewing and screening candidates, mentoring high potential employees, providing performance feedback, developing people, motivating the team, understanding their needs, providing them the necessary information to perform their jobs.
It is quite unfortunate that today’s managers and leaders do not spend enough time on people. Their lack of attention and focus on developing their people creates a vicious circle. Since they do not spend time developing their people, they end up doing their direct reports job. When they do their direct reports job, their direct reports do not develop. When their direct reports stagnate, they cannot perform as expected. Since they cannot perform as expected, their boss (you) end up doing their jobs and back to square one again.
We often think that doing the job of our employee is faster than taking the time developing our direct reports to do the tasks. We think that if we delegate the work, they will probably do a bad job and we will end-up re-doing the work. Our false logic dictates that if this is the case then we might as well save time and do the job myself.
Great managers think long term. Great leaders think about sustainable solutions and not just band aids. When we spend time and a lot of effort developing our direct reports, we are investing in a better future for us and the company. Eventually, our direct reports will do such a great job that we can set them on auto-pilot. This will allow us the time to do what we should be doing, leading and developing our people.
You and your company cannot go wrong when you focus on your people agenda 0 selecting, developing and promoting the right people.
Customer service, customer obsession, customer experience are buzz words that are prevalent nowadays. It is very important, even critical, for companies to be customer-centric. No customers mean no revenues. Simply, the goal is to attract customers, keep them coming back and get them to refer us to their friends.
However, we sometimes fail in our delivery of service. What do we do then? How do we recover irate customers? Customers that we failed to service correctly. We have two options; we recover them or we don’t.
We were at Pizza Hut Robinsons Galleria three days ago. Our experience with that branch was terrible. A spoon drops in front of a server as she finishes taking our order. She simply ignores it, does not bother picking the spoon from the floor and walks away. We needed to remind them about the mushroom soups we ordered. The soup (appetizer) was not served at the start of the meal but in the middle. The chicken we ordered was served after we finished our large size pizzas – two of them in fact. As expected, we could not eat the chicken we ordered anymore.
As we were leaving we passed by the restaurant manager who’s back was turned to us. He did not bother thanking us for coming. The restaurant manager was busy scrolling through his Facebook account.
Yesterday, we went to a newly opened restaurant – DC Superheroes Café. It was the first day of their soft opening. As expected, we faced a lot of issues. However, the difference in service recovery between the Café and Pizza Hut was glaring. Pizza Hut did not bother recovering their unhappy customers.
DC Superheroes Café clearly showed great effort apologizing for their short-comings and making up for it. The owners themselves walked over to apologize and asked for our suggestions. The servers kept their smiles as they tried their best to cope up with the process inefficiencies. By the end of our meal, the owner of the Café had become chummy with our ten-year-old son. As we left we are more forgiving of the issues we faced with DC Superheroes Café. We will be dropping by again the next time we are in SM MegaMall.
Customer Service Recovery at its best and worst. Service Recovery makes for a huge difference in customer experience.
Do you have a Service Recovery policy or process in place?
Finger pointing and excuses seem to make up part of most corporate culture. You often hear, it’s not me it was another person that failed to deliver. I waited for the other department to reply but they never did. In my consulting years here in the Philippines, I witness this behaviour from entry level employees to a number of high ranking executives.
I was pleasantly surprised to discover a simple approach to making people aware of their finger pointing behaviour. The approach was shared by the Managing Director of an ad agency. It is called ORA / BED.
The ORA / BED phrase has two parts. On the left side or on the top of the line we have ORA. ORA stands for Ownership, Responsible, Accountable. All positive traits of a successful leader, manager or employee.
At the bottom you have BED. This stands for Blaming, Excuses and Denial. They are all negative behaviours.
The way it is used is three parts. First, explain the meaning of ORA / BED. Second, have it posted on collaterals to serve as a reminder. Third, whenever discussions turn negative (BED), you just have to remind everyone to keep the discussion in ORA. Personally, I say ‘Hey guys let’s keep the discussion above the line. Let’s keep it in ORA.’ It helps people become conscious of their behaviour.
Since I started using this in the groups I manage and clients I mentor, the discussions I get are more positive and productive.
Try it. ORA / BED. It’s deceptively simple. It’s so simple that it works.
Finger pointing and excuses seem to make up part of most corporate culture. You often hear, it’s not me it was another person that failed to deliver. I waited for the other department to reply but they never did. In my consulting years here in the Philippines, I witness this behaviour from entry level employees to a number of high ranking executives.
Too many companies have untrained leaders that fail. 