Breaking Through
Leadership and Strategy Notes by Laura Huckabee-Jennings

February 10, 2011

Top 10 reasons you need a coach

Filed under: Business Strategy,Career Development — Tags: , , , , — Laura Huckabee-Jennings @ 9:28 am

“Everybody needs a coach. Every famous athlete, every famous performer has somebody who is coach — somebody who can say ‘Is that what you really meant?’ and give them perspective. The one thing people are not really good at is seeing themselves as others see them. A coach really, really helps.” – Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google

As a very successful CEO, why would someone like Eric Schmidt suggest that he needs a coach and so do you?  I see executives every day who make incredible strides forward toward their goals with the help of an executive coach.  Their work is inspiring, and I am honored to be part of it.  But some of you may still wonder what a coach could do for you and why you should invest in an external coach for yourself.

Thinking about the key reasons that have power for supporting your success and growth, the Top 10 reasons for hiring an external executive coach are:

  1. Your coach is there for you, your agenda, your goals.  Your coach cares about your success, as you define it.
  2. Your coach helps you get clarity around your goals, get inspired by them and what they mean for you, and maintain focus in your busy world.
  3. Your coach looks for your blind spots and helps you see the impact you have from a new perspective and see new alternatives to move you forward.
  4. Your coach is a source of ideas, knowledge, tools, cutting-edge thought, and a broad body of experience and perspective that helps you recognize challenges early, and discover new and creative solutions.
  5. Your coach helps you grow as a leader by developing your awareness, your thinking, your knowledge base and your vision for what is possible.
  6. Your coach will not judge you for what you say or do.  You can be perfectly honest about your fears, doubts and concerns and your weak moments without repercussion.  You can truly get out your feelings, worries and challenges and address them with your coach in a confidential manner.  Your conversations are private so that you can tackle any situation – even those you don’t feel you can share with anyone else.
  7. Your coach supports you in being accountable for taking action on your biggest priorities.  When you take on a new habit, behavior, style of communicating or other change to your ingrained habits, your coach is your partner for making new habits stick and addressing obstacles as they arise.
  8. Your coach provides disciplined self-reflection on what you are doing and where you are going.  You have structured time to take the larger view on your career, your business, your progress toward your big picture goals – and that is what will truly allow you to grow as a leader.
  9. Your coach is your objective external sounding board to help you try out new thoughts, behaviors and ideas in a safe environment and giving you feedback on what is moving you forward and what appears to be holding you back.
  10. Your coach is a witness to your success and encourages the discipline of measuring your progress and celebrating your achievements, and building confidence and accountability for your actions and decsions that move you forward in achieving your goals.

What could you achieve this year with a coach?

January 10, 2011

Rediscovering Your Passion for Business

Filed under: Business Strategy — Tags: , , , , , — Laura Huckabee-Jennings @ 11:57 am

Did you go into business to change the world, make money, be your own boss, express your creative side, or just create a corporate culture that honored your personal values?  Did that passion get lost somewhere along the journey of establishing product lines, websites, employee manuals, call scripts, business metrics, processes and legal documents?  You are not alone.  Many business owners start out with a passion for what they are doing, and lose their way at some point and feel overwhelmed running their business.

What would it mean for you to rediscover your passion and live each day fulfilling your dream, without the overwhelm?

For most business owners, rediscovering your passion means taking a hard look at what is causing you to feel stress and overwhelm, and tackling that at the source.  This process is simple, but not easy to undertake on your own.  We create our own stress by how we think about our circumstances and how we choose to react to them.  So, the root cause of your stress is you, and there are particular circumstances or interactions that trigger you to feel stress – and these will be unique to you.  The great news is that you can change the stress you create for yourself in any circumstance just by shifting how you think about it.  The first step is to raise your awareness of the kinds of thoughts that are triggering your stress, and take them out into the light of day and decide if they are thoughts that are helping you along your path, or getting in your way.

One of the best ways to raise your awareness in this way is to work with a coach, or a group of business owners who have been through similar things and share some of your frustrations, fears and stress to uncover the hidden thoughts that are raising your stress.  With a professional coach and other business owners, you can ideas on what thoughts are holding you back and how you might change them to gain productivity, confidence and courage.  Even on your own, you can work on this by journaling your stress: try writing down the moments where you feel irritated, worried, guilty, fearful, or angry.  Notice what thoughts are racing through your mind as you experience that feeling and write them down.  Decide which thoughts are serving you well and represent the truth, and which thoughts are creating stress in you.  As you start to identify thought patterns that cause you stress and situations that trigger them, you will gain control over the level of stress you feel, and allow  yourself to refocus on the things you love about being in business.

Stay tuned for another post on Rediscovering Your Passion for Business soon, and join our preview call for upcoming Business Growth Mastermind Coaching in January!

Join us for a Preview Call on January 25th at 12:00 pm CST.


Click this link to register for the Preview Call!

January 5, 2011

Becoming the Business Person You Were Meant To Be – Part 10: Adopting Continuous Improvement

Filed under: Business Strategy,Career Development — Tags: , , , , , — Laura Huckabee-Jennings @ 1:42 pm

With all the support mechanisms we’ve reviewed over the past few months in place, you are well on your way to realizing your goals and achieving your personal vision, in line with your most dear values.

So what remains to define your journey to a more fulfilling life?  Simply making the changes needed to integrate this process into your life on an ongoing basis.  As your life changes and you achieve key elements of your vision, you may find that your vision begins to expand or change in ways that cause you to incorporate new goals.  As you gain skills and overcome obstacles to your success, you may find entirely new skills suddenly become relevant and perhaps even critical to achieving your goals.

How can you incorporate this change without losing your momentum?  Just as good manufacturing processes include an element of continuous improvement, or Kaizen, you can apply this same concept to your vision and your process of achieving it.  And just like running a business or organization of any kind, you want to plan on some regular reviews and opportunities to review what is going well, and what you might want to change.

What personal practices do you currently have in place?  How could you integrate some review of your personal goals and progress into those practices?  If you journal daily, how would you include some review of your plans into that?  If you review your finances quarterly, what would adding a review of other aspects of your business or life at that time add to your ability to plan for the future?  Are there other mindfulness or planning or visioning practices that would lend themselves well to reviewing your vision, goals and recommitting to them, or making appropriate changes to keep the inspiring and motivating to you?

With a vision, goals, strategies and plans that originate in your personal skills, talents, preferences and values, you will find yourself living a life of greater satisfaction, purpose and energy. This higher level of energy will allow you to achieve so much more than you thought possible in your chosen field, while leaving you abundant energy to share with others and inspire them to find their own source of energy, inspiration and fulfillment.

Want to learn more and get help becoming your truest self?  Learn more about my Mastermind Coaching Groups starting this month and come to the preview call:  http://transcendllc.biz/blog/business-growth-mastermind-group

December 22, 2010

Becoming the Business Person You Were Meant To Be – Part 9: Powerful Partnering

Filed under: Business Strategy,Career Development — Tags: , , , , — Laura Huckabee-Jennings @ 9:40 am

At yet a higher level of engagement than simply getting feedback, is developing partnerships to support you in pursuing your vision.

Partners can be colleagues, family members, friends, or anyone who has an interest in helping you meet your goals and achieve your vision.  When considering who you might enroll as your partner, think about who might share your vision, benefit from you achieving it, or be pursuing a similar vision themselves.

The purpose of partnering is to find continuing support from someone who truly wants you to achieve your goals and is able to provide help to you when you need it.  In a coaching relationship, you can count on your coach to be supportive of whatever vision you are creating, and unbiased about what goals you choose, or how you choose to get there.  A professional certified coach is one of the best ways to achieve this level of partnership, but if coaching is not for you, you can find other types of partnership that help you grow and learn on your journey to your vision.

Some things a partner can bring to you include resources, ideas, a brainstorming partner, encouragement, accountability and feedback.  If you are both working toward similar goals, you can trade success stories, celebrate together as you reach milestones, and pull each other up when you get discouraged in any particular area.

If you can’t find an obvious partner in your immediate circle, you may want to focus on a specific goal and look for others who are acquiring a similar skill or habit.  For example, if you have an important goal that includes developing stronger public speaking skills, your local Toastmasters may be a resource both in developing that skill, but also in finding partners in your journey to reach that goal.

Depending upon your goal, you may find local networking groups, existing support groups, and alumni or educational groups where others share your goal and are actively sharing their successes, strategies and struggles, and these groups can be the source of great power in keeping you on course

Who will you choose to partner with in your journey?  Which partners might be right for each of your goals?

December 9, 2010

Becoming the Business Person You Were Meant To Be – Part 8: Feedback

Filed under: Business Strategy — Tags: , , , , — Laura Huckabee-Jennings @ 4:35 pm

So now you are working toward your goal, you are holding yourself accountable for implementing your plans, and probably beginning to feel more focused and like you are on the path to your vision.  What helps keep you on the path?  How will you know when to make course corrections?  What are you measuring to see what progress you are making?

Of course tangible goals like losing weight, or eating better can be measured on a scale, or by tracking your meals and looking back to see how you did.  But what about other goals you might have like losing your temper less often, or listening better?  Because these goals are measured by how others perceive you and your behavior, you may need to develop a system for getting regular feedback and understanding how much progress you are making, and what else you might need to consider.

In the work environment, you may already be getting feedback from peers, a boss, investors, and at home you may have a partner, children or other family members who observe you first hand.  Instead of relying on existing feedback mechanism, it can be very helpful to ask these observers about what they see you doing and how that has changed.  What appears to be working, and what remains to be improved?  If your goal is a great working relationship with your team, ask them how they would characterize your working relationship with them now and how that has changed since you began implementing your strategies.

Let others know what you are working on, and ask them to help you by letting you know how you are doing on that.  By being vulnerable and human, and letting others know you are aware of areas you could do better, you are likely to be seen in a more sympathetic light even when you do not make progress, or when you backslide.

Feedback is critical when you are seeking a result that involves other people and their perception of your behavior and how it impacts your relationship with them.  You may think you have dramatically improved your listening skills, but if no one else can see a difference, you may still have a long way to go, and detailed feedback from a trusted source can be the difference between making a quantum leap toward your goals and meandering along and perhaps missing the mark and ultimately slowing your progress toward your vision.

November 10, 2010

What Makes Executive Coaching Unique

Filed under: Business Strategy,Career Development — Tags: , , , , , , — Laura Huckabee-Jennings @ 10:03 am

Anyone who is not already familiar with the concept of executive coaching may easily confuse it with related professional advice from other sources.  Since executive coaching clients are often senior executives, they have probably experienced many kinds of advice and encouragement in their professional careers, but coaching is a unique form of personal leadership development.

Perhaps the most familiar advisor for many executives is the mentor.  A mentor is an invaluable resource at any stage of your career and provides advice, counsel and resources to show an executive how to achieve success in the way that the mentor did it.  The mentor shares the strategies that worked for them at a similar stage in their career to help the executive achieve similar results.  The mentor is usually 2-3 levels further on in their career than the executive and has a “been there done that” approach to helping the executive think through the options in front of them.  They can provide a model for how progress can be made – and the executive gets a roadmap for following in the mentor’s footsteps.

A coach, on the other hand, is not necessarily someone who has taken the exact career path the coaching client is pursuing, but helps the executive develop their own path to whatever destination they are seeking.  While a coach may provide resources, models and ways of reframing a situation, the coach does not provide “the solution” for how to handle a situation, but helps the executive consider many alternatives for moving forward.  The coach is not there to tell the executive how to do their job better, but rather to provide an outside perspective to help the executive consider more broadly the impact of their actions and a wide range of possible alternatives to arrive at more powerful solutions that fit the executive and the situation.

Think about great athletes and their coaches.  The coach is often a fan of the game, a student of the game, but usually not a superstar player themselves.  Like a great sports coach, an executive coach is not necessarily a better player than you at your game, but the coach can provide feedback and insight to help you fulfill your potential and reveal your inner greatness.

When you are navigating the waters of a culture, club or structure where there is a more senior person whose footsteps you want to to travel, a mentor can be a great fit and a huge help in making the right connections, playing the politics and getting seen in the right places.  However, for the executive who is creating a new game or forging a new path due to changing markets, customers, organization or technologies, a coach can guide the executive to get very clear on the goal, develop strategies that leverage their unique strengths and talents, plan and implement every day, and clear away barriers as they arise.

The coaching relationship is a unique one that can open the eyes of an executive to new possibilities and catapult them to greatness of their own making.

October 29, 2010

Becoming the Business Person You Were Meant To Be – Part 7: Creating Accountability

Filed under: Business Strategy — Tags: , , , , , , — Laura Huckabee-Jennings @ 5:58 pm

In coaching relationships, one element of the relationship to which many clients ascribe great power is the accountability provide by the relationship.  The client makes a plan to take certain actions over the next week, and the coach will ask about those actions in the next session.  While there is no right or wrong for doing or not doing any action item, many clients feel that they have made a formal commitment to taking those actions, and will work much harder to complete them, just knowing that they will be reporting on them to their coach.

Even outside of coaching relationships, you can build an accountability partnership with people who share your goal.  If your team at work decided that you will all eliminate complaining, you can hold one another accountable and help each other notice when you spiral into a negative cycle.  Just knowing that one other person is going to be asking you about your progress can help you stay on track with your intended actions.

In an organization, there is no skill more important than “walking the talk”, or living by the principles that you publicly espouse.  If you have ever seen a management team say they “value diversity” and never change the gender/race/nationality of their own team, you know what I’m talking about.  Another great example in corporate America is companies who say “people are our greatest asset” and then allow poor people management skills to persist and even promote the individuals with the poorest people skills – because they bring in revenue results.  At what cost?

The cost for a management team not “walking the talk” is in losing credibility and trust.  This is often when the corporate mission begins to be seen as a “slogan of the week” to be hung on the wall and ignored, just like the last one was.

The cost to you as an individual in not “walking the talk” and honoring your commitments to yourself is that you begin to lose trust and faith in your own ability to follow through.  The impact of this is greatest on your confidence, your self-image and your faith that you can overcome obstacles.  An accountability relationship of some kind can help you stay on track, and also help you catch yourself quickly when you begin to fall short of your action plan, and make adjustments to the plan, or to your habits and thoughts to ultimately bring you success.

September 15, 2010

Becoming the Business Person You Were Meant to Be – Part 5: Developing Strategies

Filed under: Business Strategy,Career Development — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Laura Huckabee-Jennings @ 11:57 am

With SMART goals in hand, you are ready to build strategies around them.  This is just like developing business strategies in that you can look at your various strengths and build strategies that play to them.  If you know one of your key strengths from Strengths Finder is “Relator”, you work best through people.  So, you might find that you want to work on a goal through finding a group that share the goal and working with them. Or you are an extrovert, you might exercise more regularly if you were in a group doing the same (a class, a group training together for a race, etc.).

There are always multiple strategies for achieving any goal, and these can be as personal as the goals themselves.  If you want to reduce the amount of soda you drink, you might think about when you drink it now, what triggers you to drink it, and what alternatives you might create for yourself.  Not having it at home could help someone who primarily drink soda at home, but if you drink it mostly at work from the vending machine while on a break with colleagues, your strategy would probably be very different.

If you are trying to replace an old habit, whether it be interrupting others in conversation or asking multiple questions at once before you get answers, you will want to find new behaviors to replace them with.  You might work on shutting off the internal dialogue that has you preparing what you want to say by listening to the other person and building a mental image of what they are saying and taking a breath in the silence before you say anything.  You might have a mantra before you speak of “one question”… and practice not speaking until you had the question you really wanted to ask.

A strategy is simply a decision about how to use resources to solve a problem.  It is a choice about what you will do and what you will not do in order to achieve a goal.  When you have given a strategy a good chance to succeed and find it ineffective, it’s time to come up with a new strategy.  Remember, experimenting is how we learn.  Failures are opportunities to examine what happened with a critical eye and design a new solution that may work better.

What strategies will you come up with to reach your goals?  How can you learn about strategies that have worked for others and might be useful to you?  How will you leverage your innate strengths and values to make your strategies right for you?

August 12, 2010

Becoming the Business Person You Were Meant to Be – Part 4: Setting Great Goals

Filed under: Business Strategy,Career Development — Tags: , , , , , , — Laura Huckabee-Jennings @ 11:30 am

Now that you have a vision of where you are going, it is important to set goals that move you in the direction of your vision. I like to make sure they are SMART goals. You may have heard this acronym before, but it stands for: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-Bound.

If your goal is to have a healthy body, for example, you might set a goal of losing 20 pounds by October 31st, 2010, or you might set a goal of reducing your soda consumption to no more than 8 oz per day by September 1st, or any other goal that helps you reach your definition of “a healthy body”. The exact goals you set will be very specific to you, and there is no “right” or “wrong” goal, just like there isn’t a “right” vision.

In a business context, your goal might be to improve effectiveness of your meetings, and the SMART goal could be something like: Have a clear agenda for each meeting 24 hours ahead of time and end each meeting on time and with a clear set of action items assigned to specific individuals with deadlines. Or: Have only one key issue per meeting, and keep meetings to under 1 hour. Or: Have meetings only when there is a need for discussion and decision-making or quick touch-base meetings, not just to “share” information better presented in writing. All of these are possible goals. The point is to make it specific to your image of what the goal looks like.

To start with, you need to get specific about what things would have to be present for you to feel you have attained your vision. If your vision is to have a healthy body, what does that mean to you? Is it about weight, body fat percentage, how fast you walk a mile, ability to touch your toes, how much you can bench press, how often you exercise, the kinds of foods you nourish yourself with, the measure of cholesterol or other blood chemicals? If your vision is to have effective meetings, what does that mean? Is it about wasting less time, enjoying meetings more, having fewer meetings, building accountability, increasing focus, or just about making clearer decisions in meetings? All of these are possible, and many many more. Sometimes it helps to close your eyes and place yourself in your vision and imagine how you will feel there, and what will have changed for you to feel this way.

Now that you have visualized it, what specific goals did you attain to feel that way? And how can you begin moving in that direction? If you have a specific business-related goal, what are some first steps you could take to work toward your vision?

While setting goals, it is important to remember to set Realistic goals (remember the “R” in SMART?). Too often, we set goals that are very ambitious, but perhaps too ambitious and when we are unable to achieve them as quickly as we planned, we feel that we have failed.

In order to avoid this feeling of failure, but still stretch yourself to push a little further than is “easy”, it is best to set yourself a series of smaller goals for the coming week or month. To stick with our health example, a set of first steps might be to have a physical, stop drinking sugary drinks, and start walking 30 minutes every day. While this might be possible, it might be challenging, so you might set a “minimum acceptable” goal of getting the physical, and walking at least twice a week for 30 minutes, and eliminating sugary drinks during the week. Finally, you might set a target somewhere between this minimum and your ideal, and aim for that. At least if you achieve the minimum, you will feel that you have made meaningful progress, and you may be able to do even more than that in the process.

For our business meeting example, you might start with small steps such as making a list of all the types of meetings you currently have, and identifying the purpose each is serving, and outlining which ones could be eliminated, which ones need to be improved, and what might need to be added. Your “minimum acceptable” goal might be to just have the list of current meetings and their purpose. And the target could be somewhere in between where you have the list of meetings and their purpose, and you identify which ones most need improvement. Again, you will at least be able to make the list, and feel you are “on the path” to making improvements, but also feel like there is some challenge in reaching for the middle and ideal targets.

If your goals are long-term, such a 1-2 year or more away, be sure to set up some interim goals. In most cases, it is hard to set a goal of getting a big promotion, getting married, changing your corporate culture or other multi-step challenges and achieve it in a couple of months, so break your goal up into shorter-term milestones that you can aim for and feel the satisfaction of making progress before you achieve ultimate success.

Now that you have established your goals, write them down. Track them. Review them at least weekly and see how you are progressing. If you find that you are slipping, think about what specifically happens in the moment you slip up, and how you might change your thoughts and emotions to break through the next potential slip and move forward.

More next time on developing strategies around each goal.

May 20, 2010

Becoming the Person You Were Meant To Be – part 2: Defining Your Values

Filed under: Career Development,Life Choices — Tags: , , , — Laura Huckabee-Jennings @ 9:03 am

The root of finding fulfillment and being true to yourself is understanding your own personal values at a deep and fundamental level.  When you honor your values, you find satisfaction in what you are doing and feel at peace.  On the contrary, when your values are violated, you may feel angry or deeply frustrated.

How can you discover your values?  One way is to look at  list of values and try to select those that speak to you, and then keep shortening the list until you are down to the most important 5 and prioritizing those.  You can also look at moments in your life when you felt most fulfilled, satisfied and full of purpose and ask yourself which values were being honored.  Conversely, when you think of times you were angry, you can ask yourself which values were being violated.

I noticed this myself when I found myself getting angry over trying to change an airline ticket to go home about 12 hours earlier than planned, and being asked to pay more than 3x what the original ticket had cost for the pleasure of doing so.  When I looked closely at my reaction I realized that I have a strong value around fairness, and this situation just felt inherently unfair, and that was the basis for my anger.

Keep a list of your values and once you have the top five, try sorting them in order of importance.  Which one must you honor above all others?  Which one would keep you from being happy were it violated?  Once you have a top value, which one would come next?  And so forth.

These Values help you quickly assess opportunities, people, projects and environments which will serve you and those which will conflict with your core values.  Here’s one list of possible values, but you may find others fit more closely for you – feel free to add your own words and explore what feels right for you.

Abundance Acceptance Accomplishment Accuracy
Achievement Adaptability Adventure Affection
Affluence Aggressiveness Agility Alertness
Altruism Ambition Appreciation Assertiveness
Attentiveness Attractiveness Audacity Awareness
Balance Beauty Belonging Benevolence
Boldness Bravery Brilliance Calmness
Candor Capability Celebrity Certainty
Challenge Charity Charm Chastity
Cheerfulness Clarity Cleanliness Comfort
Commitment Compassion Confidence Conformity
Connection Consciousness Consistency Contribution
Control Coolness Cooperation Courtesy
Creativity Credibility Curiosity Decisiveness
Deference Dependability Depth Determination
Devoutness Dignity Diligence Discipline
Discovery Discretion Diversity Dominance
Duty Economy Education Effectiveness
Efficiency Elegance Empathy Endurance
Energy Enthusiasm Excellence Expertise
Exploration Fairness Faith Family
Fearlessness Fidelity Financial independence Firmness
Fitness Flexibility Flow Focus
Freedom Friendliness Frugality Generosity
Giving Grace Gratitude Growth
Harmony Health Holiness Honesty
Honor Humility Humor Imagination
Impact Impartiality Independence Industry
Insightfulness Integrity Intelligence Intensity
Intimacy Intuition Joy Justice
Kindness Knowledge Leadership Learning
Liberty Logic Love Loyalty
Making a difference Mastery Maturity Meekness
Mellowness Mindfulness Modesty Neatness
Obedience Open-mindedness Optimism Organization
Originality Passion Peace Perceptiveness
Perfection Perseverance Philanthropy Piety
Playfulness Poise Popularity Power
Pragmatism Preparedness Privacy Professionalism
Prosperity Punctuality Purity Realism
Reason Recognition Recreation Relaxation
Reliability Resilience Resourcefulness Respect
Reverence Rigor Sacredness Sacrifice
Security Self-control Selflessness Self-reliance
Sensitivity Sensuality Serenity Service
Sexuality Silliness Simplicity Sincerity
Skillfulness Solidarity Spirituality Spontaneity
Strength Structure Success Support
Sympathy Teamwork Temperance Traditionalism
Tranquility Trust Truth Understanding
Unflappability Utility Variety Virtue
Vision Vitality Wealth Winning
Wisdom Wonder Zeal

February 25, 2010

Building Engagement

Filed under: Business Strategy — Tags: , , , , — Laura Huckabee-Jennings @ 1:45 pm

Engagement is one of the most difficult concepts for most managers to grasp.  “What is engagement, what control do I have over it, and what would I do to increase it?”  And sometimes, “Why is this my job?”

Engaged employees work harder, are more productive, and actively build enthusiasm among fellow employees and customers.  If you are not the primary customer interface, think about the attitudes of the people in your company who are.  An actively engaged employee is going to go the extra mile to satisfy your customers and feel happy about doing it.

If your employees are not actively engaged (and the average percentage who are is 30%), they are either “not engaged” or worse, “actively disengaged”.  You may think of the actively disengaged as the whiners, complainers and others who spread disgruntlement throughout the organization.  You already know what impact the actively disengaged have on their coworkers – have you thought about how they treat your customers?  They don’t necessarily break procedure, but they are less cheerful, less helpful, and generally less willing to do the right thing for the customer.

So, if you weren’t before, you should now understand why engagement is part of any manager’s job.  It’s linked to critical measures like customer satisfaction, employee turnover, productivity and profit.

Secondly, you might ask, “How can I improve engagement?”  You probably have employees you think will never be engaged, but the average company has 25% of employees “actively disengaged”, while world-class companies only have 8% in this category.  Clearly there are some who cannot be budged out of this category, but most of them can be engaged.  Take responsibility for the level of engagement in your organization.  You can make a difference and you are contributing to the level of engagement you currently have.

But how do you build engagement?

Engagement starts with taking a personal interest in each employee.  Understand what they get out of work, help link their personal values and goals to those of the company or workgroup.  After this, begin to think of employees as assets that need development.  If you had expensive capital equipment on the factory floor, don’t you think you would pay for maintenance and upgrades as needed?  Well, employees are often the largest expense in any company, and yet they don’t get the training, mentoring and career development opportunities that would improve their productivity.

Find out what their strengths are, and find ways of using those on the job.  Find out their interests and look for ways to provide opportunities to grow and learn in areas they are interested in.  Celebrate successes, learn from failures and treat them like the valuable human capital they are.

You won’t be sorry you did.

November 24, 2009

Personalities in the Workplace: 5 Key Tips

Filed under: Business Strategy,Career Development — Tags: , — Laura Huckabee-Jennings @ 10:58 am

What do you do when you find someone in your workplace difficult?  Ignore them, undermine them, placate them?  How can you get disparate personality types to work together productively?

Most of us have found certain people difficult to work with from time to time, and just being the boss doesn’t make managing these people any easier, so what can you to keep work productive and less frustrating all around?

  1. First seek to understand.  What do you know about this person?  What motivates them?  Where are their strengths?  In what areas are they an asset to the team or business?  In areas you find them difficult, what about your own preferences may be conflicting with theirs?
    How could you adjust your way of communicating and working with this individual to make them feel more comfortable and motivated?
  2. Develop common goals and teamwork.  It’s harder to have conflict when you are united with others around a common goal.  But big goals that are a year away or depend on so many other factors are not very motivating or unifying.  Under the “big” goals, a team needs frequent, small measurable goals that they can share.  Do you have a goal for how many calls to make?  Response time?  Meetings completing their agenda on time?  Anything that is frequent, measurable and requires the team to get it done will work.  Make sure there are some rewards and recognition associated, even as small as a “Well Done” sign where everyone can see, or lunch for the team at the end of the month.  It doesn’t have to cost a lot to be effective.
  3. Clarify expectations.  I know, you are always very clear.  But, really, are you?  Is the message you are transmitting being received the way you intended?  Are you being specific enough about what is needed and how it is to be delivered?  Spend time not only communicating your expectations, but also hearing them played back to you so you can make sure the message was heard clearly.  “Be more courteous” could mean more pleases and thank yous to one person, but mean always showing up 5 minutes early for meetings to another.  Which did you want to have happen?  Be specific and concrete.
  4. Give and receive feedback on the spot.  When you see a behavior that isn’t in line with your expectations, or have a communication or meeting that goes badly, don’t let 2-3 weeks or even 2-3 days go by before you sit down and talk about it with the people involved.  Take 5 minutes right then and there.  Cool down if you need to, but make sure you provide feedback or gather feedback while the incident is still fresh in everyone’s mind.  You may discover that you are someone else’s “difficult person” and that a few small changes will improve the environment for everyone.
  5. Don’t hesitate to let a bad actor go.  If you’ve tried to understand motivational and personality differences, built common goals, clarified expectations and given and received on the spot feedback and someone is still behaving badly or wrecking your team dynamics, sometimes you need to just amicably part ways.  There’s nothing harder on a team than watching someone else “get away with murder” with seemingly no consequences.In one client’s company I remember an employee saying “You can’t get fired from here”.  Well, if that doesn’t just encourage bad behavior, I don’t know what does.  Stop the bad actor or eliminate them, and morale will improve.

Workplace harmony begins at the top, and it isn’t about agreeing or hugging each other.  It’s about finding ways to leverage differences rather than letting them become barriers to growth.  Healthy disagreement and dialogue usually lead to better outcomes, but they need to remain goal-focused, respectful and based on data whenever possible.

Giving Thanks

Filed under: Business Strategy,Life Choices — Tags: — Laura Huckabee-Jennings @ 10:56 am

This holiday season, I have so much to be thankful for.  My family is healthy, we are financially intact, my business is growing, my clients are interesting, learning and taking away great lessons and growth from our work together.  My children are doing well in school and other pursuits, and I’m taking on some new creative work that satisfies my soul.

Most of all, I feel a positive wind of change in the air.  I don’t know what 2010 will hold, but I am excited about it and meeting it with eyes wide open and charged up to take on whatever comes my way.  I am thankful for the energy to do this, and the support of my husband to keep pursuing my dreams.

What are you giving thanks for this holiday season?  What has blessed your life this year?

November 2, 2009

Environmental Design

Filed under: Business Strategy,Career Development,Life Choices — Tags: , — Laura Huckabee-Jennings @ 9:11 am

In the coaching world, we talk about environmental design as a way of enhancing and facilitating change and development. What that really means is that change is easier when the environment you live and work in supports the change.

Have you ever been to a training where you learned about a new exciting tool and came back ready to kick off a new way of working, interacting or planning, only to find that enthusiasm dampened by day 2, and the training forgotten within a few weeks? This is a result of poor environmental design.

You have a new tool or skill, but you come back to the same office, same desk, same tasks, same co-workers – all of which supported the old set of habits and skills. Without support and an environment that actively and passively encourages the use of new skills, the old patterns re-emerge quickly.

So what can you do to really look at your environment and how it impacts your ability to implement change? Here are 5 ways to look around and see what is supported in your environment:   

  1. Physical Environment. Look around and see what is in your immediate work environment. Is it neat and organized or cluttered and messy? Where do new items land? Where do “important” projects and tasks land? Do you face colleagues or a wall or window? What can you hear in your environment? When you look at your physical environment, does it encourage you to take the actions you need? Is it more conducive to collaborative work or solitary research/writing and thinking? Does it help you focus? Does it keep you abreast of what everyone in the team is doing? What is important to you and your progress, and does the physical environment support that? How could you make it more supportive of your goals?
  2. Social Environment. What do you get from the people in your work, home and social environment? Do they encourage you to reach your goals? Do they have compatible goals? Are they prone to sabotaging your efforts, or are they excited to see you change? If they aren’t supportive, who could you recruit to spend more time with who would be more encouraging?
  3. Temporal Environment. How do you structure your time during the day and over the course of a week, and how does that impact your ability to make changes and achieve your goals? Are you able to use your most productive hours on the most difficult tasks? Are you actively managing your energy levels and scheduling tasks when the right energy is there to support them?
  4. Intellectual Environment. What kinds of intellectual stimulation do you get from your environment? Do you have challenging people with new ideas in your environment? What kinds of reading material, news, radio and other media do you keep in your environment and how does that impact your goals? What changes might improve your motivation and ability to stay on track with new behaviors and skills?
  5. Measurement Environment. What is tracked and measured in your environment? How is progress noted and how often? Are the things being measured encourage you to make change? If not, what kinds of measures might make more sense? How often are they measured?

In order to effectively make a change or build new behaviors, you can make it infinitely easier by designing the right environment. Think about someone trying to start a new diet. One of the first changes is to take “forbidden” food out of the kitchen, maybe join a support group or begin the diet with a friend or spouse, to get new recipes supporting the new diet and setting up a measurement and tracking system to see daily progress and understand any setbacks.

All changes are similar in many ways. They are hard, and can only be tackled when the motivation is there, but that is rarely enough. In order to create success, you need to carefully examine your environment and create stimuli and support for changes, new behaviors and new skills.

Transcend LLC