Being proactive is often held up as a great behaviour, and rightly so. Most of us would claim to be proactive – after all who wants to admit that they just let things happen to them and their organisations when they could be doing something about it up front?

Whilst scoping the work I am currently doing with a large UK company, we identified that when trying to be proactive in its people agenda, the company might actually unwittingly be passing on a ‘reactive’ behaviour style to the leaders in the organisation. How can that be?

Many organisations are on the front foot in understanding that a strong people agenda can help create the great leaders and great employees that builds and sustains superior, lasting performance levels within that organisation. Initiatives such as annual (plus sometimes half year) performance reviews and annual employee surveys are both stock items in the kit bag of the proactive and conscientious HR team and business leader.

Could though these seemingly proactive initiatives actually be REACTIVE?

In my mind proactive means getting ahead of the game, shaping the future before it happens. Reactive, of course, is the opposite – deciding on the best course of action after the event, once something is known.

Too many employees only find out about their performance once or twice a year, in a reactive way, in those set piece reviews. The nature of the word ‘review’ also means after the event, so how are leaders meant to be proactive when they are required to be reactive? How does the proactive leader balance the need to complete these actions whilst striving to be proactive?

What’s important is to ensure that no employee is surprised in an annual review. Prompt (like there and then, or at worst same day) feedback and discussions on observed actions and behaviours is the proactive way to manage employees, and ensure they are aware of the change you want to see and the support they will receive in making those changes. Come review time, you and they should know full well whether they have successfully made those changes.

Let’s take the same principle and look at employee surveys. Once a year, leaders ask their employees what they think of the year that has just gone, then after the results are in and analysed, they set up initiatives to tackle the areas of negative feedback. However, the proactive people leader will already know where they can support their employees more, as they will continually be building great relationships, having those difficult conversations throughout the year, and requesting and receiving feedback as readily as they are providing it. As the proactive organisation finds a way to support individual employees, as well measure and address trends across larger groups of employees, there will cease to be surprising and poor feedback in your annual survey for you to need to react to.

Giving leaders the skills and confidence to be truly proactive need not be difficult. Whilst proactive conversations are usually the scary ones, as giving and requesting feedback is a huge deal for many managers, through good training and (crucially) great follow up and support to practice their new found skills, leaders will embrace the empowerment that comes with building great relationships with their team, and with managing those employees with a proactive mindset. This change in leadership behaviour breeds a proactive culture throughout the organisation, building a head of steam towards a place where leaders and employees aren’t content with the status quo but want to question and solution their way to higher performance.

So whilst I am not discouraging the annual review or the employee survey, I firmly believe that neither should tell the recipients anything they don’t already know and that they have been actively working towards addressing – so no reaction necessary.

I work a lot with leaders in all types of companies and markets, and I focus specifically on Proactive Leadership, along with Strategic Thinking, Culture Building and Continuous Improvement, and I’d love to know your views on the relationship between reactive and proactive leadership.

6 things that will make your leadership effective

Alongside these elements of leadership must run the elements that bring order and structure to the leader and their teams.  A successful leader must provide the structure that supports those individual approaches to leadership within their teams, and directs people to work within and towards the common culture and goals of the organisation.  that everyone works within.  These aspects are less difficult to learn, are less individual to any one leader, and are critical to joining together the varying expressions of authentic leadership into a coherent and powerful force across the organisation – yet they are talked about far less than the ‘soft’ skills I mentioned earlier.  There are six aspects to this system that any leader can, and should, put in place in order to succeed:

Purpose and Vision – Making sure that each and every employee and stakeholder of your organisation knows and understands why the organisation exists is the building block for everything that comes afterwards.  The ‘why’ is crucial to appealing to people’s emotions and therefore their internal motivations – why should I invest, why should I work here, why should I try hard, why shouldn’t I call in sick?  A clear purpose, beyond that of making money, is the bedrock of successful and long lasting organisations.  Similarly, a Vision that describes, A purpose of ‘helping people from disadvantaged backgrounds gain access to business start-up funding’ might be a purpose, with ‘3,000 people will have started their own business with our help by 2020’ being a clear and measurable vision for the future you wish to see.

Strategic Goals – If you have not developed and communicated high level goals (around 3-6 is a good number), then there are no anchor points for the effort the organisation expends every day.  It is important to begin .  These should be appropriate for several years.  Often organisations and individuals are so busy, heads down, running hard, they forget to set the parameters of success and communicate them to their teams.  Give your team motivating, achievable goals, and they and you will have every reason to start running and the criteria to know when to celebrate.

A Strategy – This is roadmap.  You now know why you exist, what the overall vision looks like and what you hope to have achieved a few years down the line.  You now need to be able to explain to people, your employees and stakeholders, what exactly you want them to do with their motivation and their energy.  A great strategy makes decision making easy up and down the organisation – if something you want to do doesn’t fit with the strategy, then .  To make this work that strategy needs to be low on vague notions and high on specific, differentiating commitments to what you are going to do to achieve your goals.  “Have great customer service” is not a strategy, but “create and implement a 3-step store greeting process for every customer” is.  Pretty much any project put forward could be badged as helping to provide “great customer service”, but it would need to be much better thought through to convince the budget holders it was contributing to the “3 step store greeting process”.  Have you got that level of planning and guidance in your organisation?

Prioritisation – There are finite resources in any organisation, including human, technical and.  Too often organisations have a subterranean world of project initiation, where a perceived problem has a perceived solution and before you know it there is a project, a Project Manager, and time and resource commitments being requested of people who don’t have that time to spare.  The result is that everybody becomes too busy doing lots of things that are not coordinated and have not been judged in any formal way as befitting of investment.  In this environment all of the ‘good’ projects then struggle as resource is diverted onto all of the other projects, meaning extra effort is spent getting nothing completed successfully.  Whilst this is often a result of people meaning well and trying to make a difference, when a leader does not take hold of the situation and use these six steps to provide clear and unambiguous prioritisation guidance, that good will and effort is wasted and success is further away.

Alignment – Alignment is the science behind ensuring every employee knows what they need to achieve in any given hour, day, month and year, in a very clear and measurable way.  Objectives such as ‘demonstrate xyz’, ‘work on’ and ‘contribute to’ are not good objectives.  Measurable things such as sales figures, financial expenditure, customer satisfaction scores, productivity, problem solving and team feedback produce greater focus and greater results.  Key to this is being able to demonstrate to each individual how those objectives follow the ‘through the organisation to the strategic goals, the vision and the purpose.  How may leaders truly know that the sum of the parts will equal the whole they seek?  Do you know for sure that if every employee in a team achieves their objectives that the team leader will for sure succeed?  Then after that, that all of the team leader groups achievements will mean the next manager achieves theirs, and onwards up to you and however much higher the organisation goes?  If you can know that for sure, then you will have aligned employees and you are not leaving your success to chance.

Visual Management – Visual Management is the method by which every leader and every employee knows how the performance and outcomes that they are responsible for are going right now, in real time, visibly in the place they work.  If you wait for monthly numbers to come out before you know you have failed, you are missing the opportunity to implement a system of management that shows you where each constituent part is succeeding or failing, such that intervention can be taken instantly and PREVENT the monthly numbers being out.  Every leader talks of being proactive not reactive, but unless you have access to that sort of information in time to prevent the issue, then you will be forever moving resources from your planned projects onto things that need to be ‘fixed’.  In leadership, as in manufacturing, preventative maintenance is preferable to fixing an issue when something is broken.

With these six things in place, the senior leader is now leading effectively and inspirationally, acknowledging that each of the leaders in their organisation has their own style and their own sense of authentic leadership, but ensuring that each individual leader is clear through purpose what the organisation stands for, through vision where it is going, how it will get there through its strategy, can make the best use of resources through prioritisation, understand the role that they and each of their employees must play (alignment) in order to achieve those overall strategic goals and the progress being made day in, day out through visual management.

Any of these six elements can be judged as a ‘nice to have’, or a ‘one day, when we aren’t so busy’, but without these six elements today’s leader is relying on chance.  Chance that people are motivated by what you do and why you do it, chance that they are working on priorities you know aren’t wasting time and money, chance that they are tracking progress against agreed goals and chance that they, and you, will achieve what you want to achieve.  Great leaders don’t leave things to chance!

I’d love to hear how you as a leader balance improving the ‘sense’ of leadership amongst your leaders and teams with the ‘systems’ required to bring out the best of those disparate styles and achieve all the potential of the organisation.  Comment below to start the discussion!

Simon Murphy is the Managing Director of ASENSYS, who practice leadership consulting and leadership development with a difference @simonasensys

Copyright Simon Murphy 2016

“How do I hold my people to account”?

It is an often asked leadership question, posed usually by a leader who is frustrated that people just haven’t done what they were supposed to do, yet another deadline has slipped by, and an angry customer call is just around the corner:

Leaders deploy various tactics in order to answer that question with their teams. Increasing the number of project / work reviews, adding extra objectives, public naming and shaming, through to threats of performance management, missed promotion opportunities and potentially even dismissal.  Most of these techniques are based on the ‘stick’ method of motivation, and for that reason they only change behaviour for as long as the leader puts in the extra time and effort to wield the stick – i.e. closely manage the situation and prevent the employee slipping back to their old ways – if indeed they change in the first place.

So how can we as leaders avoid getting into this continual cycle of extra leadership effort, de-motivated employees and further missed deadlines or issues with delivery?

The key is to re-think the question you ask yourself. Ask yourself instead:

“How do I help my people to feel accountable?”

Simply put, stop trying to hold people to account, and concentrate your efforts on making the employee feel accountable. The aim is to have employees who are intrinsically motivated to do what they need to do, when they need to do it – therefore they are doing it willingly, without needing the stick of constant supervision and threats.

Of course this is easier said than done. Most leaders would say they dreamed of leading a team of people who felt accountable, felt empowered and worked together as a team, with trust in each other and their leaders. Probably very few leaders have achieved this dream completely, and some have not got anywhere close.

There are three key behaviours that you can use to change your situation and progress towards that dream, behaviours that will free up your time and get you the results you need as you move from holding your people to account to helping your people feel accountable:

1.     Give feedback on what you have observed from the employee until this point. The feedback should be specific to one or more examples of missed deadlines / poor work, and explain the impact that had on you (more worry, more time reviewing, more micro-management), the impact it had on the business (dissatisfied customers, delays to benefits from internal projects) and the impact it had on their team mates (resentment to covering for poor or not completed work). It should also be delivered promptly after the issue has come to light. Work hard not to make it emotive or general.

2.     Listen carefully to the responses given. Look past the initial reactions of anger, resentment, denial and blaming of others, as they are synonymous with people unused to receiving feedback, and again ensure you don’t respond with any emotional or confrontational language. Ask more questions. Continue to dig deeper into each answer until you are at the point where you can see why the employee is performing as they are. This could be illness, money issues, relationship issues, lack of self-confidence, personality clashes in the team, issues with you as a leader, or any manner of other non-visible issues. Questions such as “how did you feel about that?”, “why did you feel that way?” and “how do you wish that had happened differently?” can help to dig down beneath the superficial responses to the core reasons.

3.     Agree how the employee, the leader and the business can work together to fix those issues.  This could be facilitated discussions between personnel, offers of counselling or a little time off to deal with out of work issues. It could be training or further development in skills and capability. Make sure that the solutions are agreed mutually, and that plans are made to carry them out. Also make sure that it is agreed that the employee will start working on their behaviours straight away and that they understand where they can seek support that can help them.

It is imperative that the employee recognises the need for change and is committed to working hard to turn things around, which should come from the trust built in the steps above. Many employees will never have been through any of the steps above with a leader before and it may take time to build the necessary level of trust, but keep repeating the above steps and eventually you should be able to deconstruct the issues and help the employee build themselves back up again.

Things probably won’t change overnight, so be prepared to work with the employee on an ongoing basis, continuing to go through the three step process. Also be prepared to make sure that the employee knows that you have their back, with no comments to other team members or managers, other than those you need to help with the support plan. Trust is key and as you build it you will get more from the three step process, building a positive, proactive circle of behaviour and trust that will in time lead to a committed employee who feels accountable.

It is fair to say that this will not always work, as some employees will not see the need to change or have the desire or wherewithal to change, in which case there is no choice but to work through the painful but essential process of performance management. Before though you assume this is the only way, work through the above process in a caring and empathetic way. Spend your efforts helping people to feel accountable, and you should be able to stop having to spend extra time and effort holding them to account.

I’d love to hear how you get on as you try this approach so please share your experiences and thoughts below.

Simon Murphy is the Managing Director of ASENSYS, who practice leadership consulting and leadership development with a difference @simonasensys

Copyright Simon Murphy 2016

Many companies and organisations have a vision or a vision statement. The problem is, the vast majority of employees are not engaged by the vision, however much you think they are, or even wish they were. The truth is that they are not inspired or motivated by it, even though it no doubt took a huge effort and lots of time to create. No amount of internal branding, communication workshops, town hall sessions or CEO briefings will change that, however much time and money is spent on them. Why don’t employees just get it?

The biggest and simple reason for this is that employees can’t always easily make a link between the grand and beautiful vision of achievement the company and the executive team have in their mind’s eye, and the employee’s own vision for themselves (however abstract that may be). The disconnect is too great, the leap too far. Even if the company did one day reach its nirvana, the employee potentially wouldn’t notice, or feel any different. Many employees just cannot see what is in it for them to work extra hard to achieve a dream they never had.

So what can be done?

This is where vision alignment comes in.

Vision alignment is a skill that great leaders utilise, many probably without ever having given it an actual name. In basic terms, it is the ability of the leader to link the vision of the individual to the vision of the organisation.

Importantly, it must be done that way round. Not linking the vision of the company to the vision of the individual – but linking the vision of the individual to that of the company or organisation.

I have observed (and managed!) some boss / employee relationships where it is clear that there has been no attempt to get to know the employee at all, and no attempt to share some of the leader, as a person, with the employee. Some people see nothing wrong in that, believing that work is work and personal life is just that – personal.

I am not advocating that bosses and employees share every little bit of detail about their personal lives, far from it. Unless though there is some degree of sharing and understanding, a leader can never successfully understand what motivates their employees, what gives them hope and willpower to carry on when the going is tough.  That motivation and resilience usually comes from the desire to achieve their own, personal vision for their own future (again, this may only be an abstract concept, but it resides within all of us). Without that knowledge and without sharing some of their personal self, a leader cannot hope to engage that individual and their vision in the organisational vision, and show how a win-win situation can occur and both parties realise their dreams, their visions.

Put simply, an individual will be as engaged and invested in an organisational vision to the same degree that the organisation demonstrates its own engagement and investment in the vision of the individual. As the ‘organisation’ in this case is nothing more than each of its leaders, it falls to each of us as leaders to engage our people enough in themselves that we may successfully engage them in the organisation.

The organisational vision itself probably won’t motivate an employee – but by understanding each other, and then linking that understanding to the organisational vision, a leader can motivate right at the heart of the individual. Vision alignment makes leadership personal.

Do you feel you have got this sort of engagement from your employees, or have received it from your boss? I’d love to hear your experiences of how this was achieved.

Simon Murphy is the Managing Director of ASENSYS, who practice leadership consulting and leadership development with a difference @simonasensys

Copyright Simon Murphy 2016

Image by Udo Geisler

 

If you want sheep – sheep dip

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