Embrace collaboration, which is far more than an attribute or soft skill, as a core strategy.

Here are key differences between outdated “competition” and newly modeled collaboration:

Traditional Advantages

• Market dominance
• Efficiency
• Intellectual capital and proprietary knowledge
• Secrecy in the name of competition

Collaborative Advantages

• Expanded market to serve
• Agility and adaptability
• Expanded expertise
• Transparency that converts to trust

Avoid rendering a disservice to your clients and customers through redundant offerings. Begin to remove barriers, align with like-mission entities, and foster collective growth to better serve your respective constituencies while heightening financial stewardship.

Some Reflection Prompts

• Within your geo-reach, how many other organizations offer similar products and services?
• Among competitors, are there opportunities to collaborate that would reduce your overhead costs and advance the mission of both entities?
• Is your service region so flooded with similar offerings that your clients and end users become mystified as to what pathway, product, or service will work best? 

Success Story

In working with many area entities to serve a community, I recently had a great conversation with a colleague about a new offering his organization wanted to launch in our geo-zone. Because of our mutual respect and well-established working relationship, he contacted me first to ensure there wouldn’t be any negative impact or opposition. During my review of his plan, it was evident that the new endeavor would be a win for our community and offer something unique and equally expedited when compared to other offerings. 

Takeaway

Humility is a signature competency and at the core of successful collaboration.

The post Collaboration: A Strategic Advantage appeared first on Workforce Solutions.

Why it Matters

• Collectivist strategies capturing team intelligence trumps individual brilliance.
• When people feel valued and growing, engagement skyrockets.
• Capitalizing on all strengths of team members unlocks fresh innovation and ongoing contributions.

Be a leader who maps team member strengths, aligns talents with organizational priorities, and empowers team members to elicit ownership. When you invest in individual growth, you can then watch a culture of collaboration ensue, leading to a thriving work environment where ideas flourish. The result? Sustainable organizational success. Start to see your leader-self as a talent conductor in the workplace orchestra to unlock potential and witness collective wins.

Some Reflection Prompts

• What activities have you recently initiated that invite team members to utilize their entire talent reservoir?
• Do you have an established incubator — a methodology that enables new ideas to be vetted?
• Do your team members feel safe to try new things? How do you accomplish this?

Success Story

Listening sessions are critical for creating a new strategic plan or set of tactical objectives, or for implementing change. During a recent listening session, facilitators mentioned the concept of an idea incubator. A group spanning multiple generational cohorts at this organization reacted enthusiastically. When further prompted, many attendees concurred that they want to bring their best, and an idea incubator could amass their combined talent and allow them to positively contribute to the organization on an ongoing basis. Their verbal and nonverbal communication truly radiated with an eagerness to create the idea incubator!

Takeaway

Your team members are instrumental to your success. Polish what is already extraordinary.

The post Leverage Team Talent: Turn Potential into Performance appeared first on Workforce Solutions.

It begins with the truth — not the truth we wish to believe, but the actual truth of the day-to-day lived experience of your employees. Taking a hard look at the reality, rather than the vision, will begin the best practice of culture change.

Be specific and include all voices. A manifesto is short-lived. Because we want the culture to saturate every part of the environment, the more specific and digestible, the easier implementing cultural shifts will be. When employees’ voices are included, they have more buy-in to developing the organization’s culture, and change will diffuse more effectively.

Culture needs to be consistently observable: Any external party who interacts with anyone at the organization should have a comparable experience. And any internal party who interacts with any of their peers should have the same experience. You might say that a culture is a living being.

Ensure that progress is rewarded and that systems are carefully constructed and scaffolded to reinforce the culture, especially if it includes new norms. A culture has its strength in these systems.

Recall, too, that culture adaptations are fluid. They shift with economic, environmental, and societal change. Equip your leaders to nurture the culture.

Preparing for a Culture Shift

First, you want to prepare your leaders to be change agents. All too often, decisions are made that incite change — the change is implemented — but none of the proper steps in change management occur due to the time intensity. However, if constructed carefully with a built-in communication strategy, change can be adopted more quickly and with less stress for those affected.

Be intentional that this new culture will be for your future workplace. Show readiness rather than being reactionary. This means you need a team comprised of both design thinkers and forward-focused visionaries.

Design trajectories for continuous development. Because culture adaptations are fluid, so is your team, and they must remain fluid also — in terms of constantly advancing.

Some Reflection Prompts

• Have you considered hiring an Organizational Development Specialist? These professionals are culture architects, keeping company goals and objectives at the forefront of all endeavors and initiatives, who instrumentally align all employees to the desired culture state.
• Have you ever been involved or known a colleague who worked in a “sick” culture? What did you do to improve the culture?
• How do you exert solutions-mindedness?
• What would the impact be if you changed your organizational culture — truly, radically?

Success Story

We have a client who, in the past three years, has expanded their facility twice and is getting ready to expand once again. This same client has just recently had mandated overtime to meet customer demand – another element that continues to expand. With great success comes great responsibility, yet it affects team members and their lives.

However, anytime I go to this client location, I am consistently met with friendliness, positivity, and genuine interpersonal communication. While this may seem puzzling — the steadfast posit of the employees who are under extreme demands — for this organization, it’s no surprise. Starting about one year ago, the organizational leadership constructed an employee engagement and appreciation initiative that is chock full of meaningful, weekly endeavors. Through this purpose-driven effort, supporting its inclusive, people-first culture, I am eager to continue to witness their additional successes in the coming years.

The Takeaway

Appreciation is never a waste of time, but organizations with unappreciative cultures waste away.

The post Recalibrating Culture appeared first on Workforce Solutions.

The four cornerstones of human centricity are empathy, emotional intelligence, adaptability, and agility — a rather interesting combination, but one that is positioning organizations large and small for the increasing rate of change and expected speed of performance in the workplace. One could contend that human centricity is futureproofing organizational sustainability through amplified employee engagement and more effective talent recruitment.

Methods for Embedding Human Centricity as Cornerstones for Your Organization

• Establish clear purpose and provide illustrated examples for employees to realize how their efforts and contributions directly contribute to success.
• Create a mentoring and reverse mentoring program that will not only provide professional development for your employees but will also foster positive results through shared experiences and knowledge bases and put relationships atop the list of organizational priorities.
• Exemplify agility, exhibit responsiveness, and posit yourself as a change agent rather than belaboring over transactional decision-making that is one root cause of employee disengagement.

Some Reflection Prompts

• When is the last time you studied change and its effect on human condition, rather than its impact on organizational goals?
• Have you begun to infuse human centricity into your leadership repertoire, into your team dynamics, or into your general work environment?
• Agility demands focus and speed. Have you taken a deep dive to review your existing processes and identified where you are losing speed and or disabling ideas from your team?
• Have you implemented any facets of the coaching style of leadership? Effective coaches are powerful motivators, showing they are agile and adaptable in every minute of a game, and lead their teams to be the same.

Success Story

With a fellow board member, I recently compared the changes he was fielding to that of a carnival ride: “Keep your hands and feet inside the ride at all times.” While in jest, in reflection it became evident that while organizations wish for rapid change and will continue to do so at a higher rate as time goes by, I speculated whether the organizational leadership had prepared their teams for change through human centricity. All individuals have a threshold in terms of outputs, and while these outputs can be propelled using new tools and resources, strategic workforce planning dictates that we need the right person in the right job at the right time. Enter human centricity, where human condition is considered first. If aligned to strategic workforce planning using processes and motivators that engage, agility will result and continue to multiply over time.

The Takeaway

Remove the dross and out comes material for the silversmith. When leaders consider human needs first, employees are empowered to show the best version of themselves and their work.

The post Human Centricity – The New Norm appeared first on Workforce Solutions.

Some Commonly Overlooked Communication Issues

• Lack of attention: When employees do not hear from their leaders on a regular basis, they are essentially on an island, simply doing the best they can without the reinforcement to drive them forward. While this may be acceptable for the employee who is highly self-motivated, it does not work for most employees.
• Information overload: As a leader, it’s critical that you realize how much an employee cognitively processes during a workday. Mistakes, miscommunication and low morale can be a result of information overload.
• Misaligned expectations: When leaders are not precisely clear on expectations, employees may experience confusion leading to productivity problems and, over the course of time, become actively disengaged.

Some Methods to Combat Communication Issues

• Diligently make communication a core leadership function. The first goal of any leader is the growth of their direct reports. How can a leader ever really grow his or her direct reports without ongoing dialogue? By doing so, you establish trust and know your employees as individuals, and it is through this steadfast relationship development that your employees shine.
• Avoid assumptions. Believing your employees have clarity is a falsity. Be intentional with your communication, seek clarity and know that your robust, extensive experience can become a liability if you neglect to provide all details for a given process. When the steps of a process have become rote for you, it’s easier to omit critical steps an employee needs to know.
• Adopt a 360-degree lens. A common pitfall in communication is not including all parties who are affected. Think carefully when creating any kind of communication so that you consistently operate using a 360-degree lens and watch communication issues immediately reduce.

Some Reflection Prompts

• Are you communicating in a way that is supremely clear and provides feedback channels for questions and clarity?
• Is there too much communication occurring that is causing stress for employees who are trying to process long or complicated directives?
• What communication can be eliminated without mitigating efficiency, effectiveness or goal achievement?

Success Story

In a recent intake meeting at one of our clients for whom we are developing a customized corporate training program for a certain job role, it became evident that each stakeholder and subject-matter expert was viewing the process and the critical tasks of the job role entirely differently. Further, they were communicating downline in the production environment using different channels. Taken together, the root cause of the client’s inability to upskill individuals in the job role was evident: current employees were receiving mixed messaging and lacked clarity about their job expectations.

The solution: We mapped the communication process between all stakeholders and subject-matter experts. This eliminated extraneous communication channels by selecting the one that would be most consistent for those in the job role. The stakeholders and subject matter experts also attended a training program to increase their abilities in intentional communication.

The result: Increased productivity and engagement for team members, along with improved relationships between leaders and their direct reports.

The Takeaway

Examining our capabilities on an ongoing basis is a lifeblood of a leader. Constantly transforming our ability to meaningfully, intentionally, consistently and effectively communicate to an ever-evolving workforce is a non-negotiable endeavor.

The post Remove the Lingering Communication Breakdowns in the Work Environment appeared first on Workforce Solutions.

Methods to Improve Transparency

• Establish clear and consistent communication channels with regular updates and town-hall-style meetings. These allow everyone to stay informed about the organizational mission and prepare them to implement and execute the efforts for organizational success.
• Radically encourage feedback and participation. Create consistent opportunities for employees to participate and be involved in decisions that affect them.
• Move away from outdated chains of command and replace them with true open-door policies. This sets the foundation for employees to approach their leaders with concerns and further enables them to fully contribute their repertoire of talent.
• Ensure all deliverables, deadlines and performance metrics are visible for all.
• Model transparency: admit mistakes, invite everyone to the decision-making table and operate in human-centricity. See the success story below for this principle in action.

Some Reflection Prompts

• How have you recently communicated your open-door policy and have employees capitalized?
• How often do you check in with your employees?
• When was the last time you asked your employees to provide feedback on your own performance?

Success Story

A leadership team member at one of our current client firms in the industrial production sector with a multicultural employee base was struggling to increase communication across teams. They initially thought it was a cultural gap and had made efforts to improve cultural awareness across the organization, but it was ineffective.

Recalibrating their efforts, they decided to host small group sessions with a sampling of employees from each department to determine the root cause of the issue. What they discovered is that it was not a cultural gap at all, but rather employees choosing not to communicate because they didn’t think what they had to say mattered since they were never asked for their thoughts or input. Leaders had made all the decisions that affected them without their lens on the given situation.

This troubled leaders as it was a sign that employees were disengaged. Since this discovery, the organization holds roundtable events for current issues on a weekly basis. The result: an engaged workforce, higher levels of production and innovative ideas that have increased the overall organizational performance.

The Takeaway

Production effectiveness is a natural product of an engaged, mobilized workforce led by human-centric, transparent leadership.

The post Becoming a Transparent Leader – A #1 Request of Employees appeared first on Workforce Solutions.