The Power of People Skills: How to Eliminate 90% of Your HR Problems and Dramatically Increase Team and Company Morale and Performance
256
The Power of People Skills: How to Eliminate 90% of Your HR Problems and Dramatically Increase Team and Company Morale and Performance
256eBook
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Overview
People are the problem. They're always the problem. If a business person goes home frustrated, if they talk with their significant other about it, if they lay awake at night stewing about it, inevitably the problem is some person at work—a colleague, subordinate, or boss.
Handling people issues is every leader's major headache. It's what takes up the majority of their time and—more important—the bulk of their head space. Every leader can and must develop this most important of all management skills.
The Power of People Skills will teach you that there's one primary difference between a great culture and a poor one: a great culture insists on having star players in every key seat, and a poor culture tolerates under performers. In this powerful book, you will learn how to:
- Make the people decisions that can double your results, relieve your stress, and cause team morale to soar.
- Attract and retain the very best talent.
- Deal with difficult people problems in an objective and kind way.
- Overcome the reluctance we all share to confront under performers.
- Permanently solve the problems causing most of your stress.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781632658982 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Red Wheel/Weiser |
| Publication date: | 08/21/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Attracting Stars Is Lucrative — and So Much More
"If I were running a company today, I would have one priority above all others: to acquire as many of the best people as I could. I'd put off everything else to fill my bus. Because things are going to come back. My flywheel is going to start to turn. And the single biggest constraint on the success of my organization is the ability to get and to hang on to enough of the right people."
— Jim Collins, American business consultant and author of Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap ... and Others Don't
Businesses that have "A" players in every key seat outperform businesses that don't by between three and ten times, depending on which source you read. Compared to getting this right, nothing else in your business matters much; it's the issue that should be uppermost in your mind, and, like a coach of a sports team, you should be spending at least half of your head space planning, plotting, and scheming over how you're going to achieve this goal.
If you don't believe it, think for a minute about your very best employee. What would you do without that person? How would you feel if he left the company? How many people would it take to replace him? Now imagine what your business would look like if you had someone as good as him in every important role in your business. Forget your business — what would your life look like? "A" players are a joy to work with!
If you're taking an issue home with you; if you're talking over a business problem with your spouse; if you're lying awake at night, mulling things over in your mind; if you're "stuck" while facing an impossible hurdle; if you feel burned out or you're thinking of selling the business and doing something easier, the vast majority of the time you're wrestling with a people problem.
That problem may appear to be a financial or inventory or logistics or customer service issue, but usually the presenting issue is just the dummy light blinking on the dashboard. In other words, the "issue" is only a symptom that can be traced back to a root cause, and usually that root cause is a person. It might be a great person in the wrong seat; it might be an awful person in an important seat; it might be someone who was once great and who is now sitting in a seat that has outgrown him or her.
Incidentally, leaders don't usually burn out due to overwork, because productive work that you're good at can be very energizing. More often, burnout comes from playing with weak players. This forces you, the leader, to sit in your own seat, plus cover other, weaker players' positions (which are often ones that you're not good at or interested in doing). Being forced to do things that you're not great at is exhausting.
As a Leader, You're in the People Business
Once you have employed more than five people, you're no longer in the food service/manufacturing/retail business, you're in the people business! Although you can use many great initiatives and programs to upgrade your company, this one — the people business — must precede them all; if it doesn't, you're throwing your money away. Without the right people in the right seats, having the right strategy doesn't really matter — nor does having a war chest of cash or a great business idea, or a host of employee training sessions, or the latest, greatest quality program. Without the right people in the right seats, nothing works. Best team wins!
If you want to change your life, reduce your stress, and make your business lucrative and fun, first you're going to have to sort out your people problems.
The Container Store is very public about its winning equation: one great person = three good people. When founders Kip Tindell and Garrett Boone opened their first store in 1978, their organizing principle in human resources was simply to persuade their best, most loyal customers to join the company, become top-performing employees, and pay them more — a lot more — than the industry average. The founders also invested a tremendous amount into them, giving first-year full-time employees 263 hours of formal training (compared to the retail industry average of eight).
In a sector in which the average employee doesn't even stay a year, turnover at the Container Store is less than 10 percent, and a third of the company's 2,500 workers come from referrals. The company reported 20 percent growth every year since inception to 2014. In short, the Container Store focuses on finding top players — or what we will refer to from here on as "stars"— and their superior results follow.
Attracting and retaining stars is clearly lucrative for a company, but it is also so much more. Stars don't need to be motivated. They need to be coached, trained, career counseled, encouraged, and sometimes corrected or even disciplined, but never motivated. They're self-motivated. They make fewer mistakes, have better relationships with customers, and are never at the center of internal drama. Because you and others trust them, everything moves faster. They aren't involved in efficiency-killing turf wars. They don't need someone to double-check their work or repair their relationship problems.
Finding people that you both trust and love is not just about generating warm feelings, either. These people show up on the bottom line of your income statement.
In Good to Great, Jim Collins's ground-breaking study of good companies that became great (companies that beat their closest competitor by three or more times over a fifteen-year period), the first two steps every great company took was to, first, get the right leader and, second, "get the right people on the bus, and the wrong people off the bus."
Your Top Three Priorities as a Leader
Your job isn't easy, but it's not complicated, either. It's simply to:
1. Find the best possible players for your team.
2. Tell them clearly what they need to do in order to win in their role.
3. Let them know how they're doing and coach them on a regular basis.
These three tasks represent the main themes of the chapters that follow. They aren't complex; in fact, on the face of it, they seem ridiculously simple. But have you ever worked for a company that followed these three rules? If you're like most people, it's not likely. Most leaders are content to work with sub-par players, assume they'll figure the job out on their own, and never get around to giving them feedback unless something has gone outrageously wrong.
But I believe in finding the best players, making sure they are clear on what they are there to do, and then using every engagement with them as an opportunity to train, model, coach, and build their self-confidence.
As a young guy in a sales role, I was challenged by a speaker on tape to write out my one-phrase job description. This interesting exercise cuts through a lot of clutter. Mine was "to increase hot tub sales through existing and new retailers." That's it. This obvious revelation was tremendously focusing for me. I taped it to my computer monitor. It reminded me that I wasn't there to answer phones or compose emails or attend meetings or talk with guys in the factory, although I did all those things. My job was to sell.
When that kind of clarity is paired with regular feedback and coaching, results will follow.
Learning to Lead Your Team Well
Market research firm Harris Interactive surveyed more than 23,000 people employed full-time in industries including accommodation/food services, automotive, banking/finance, communications, education, healthcare, military, public administration/government, retail, technology services, and telecommunications. The poll was designed to measure "the execution gap"— that is, the gap between an organization setting a goal and actually achieving it. Here are some of their shocking findings:
• Only 37 percent of respondents knew the company's goals.
• Only 20 percent were enthusiastic about those goals.
• Only 20 percent could see how they could support those goals.
• Only 15 percent felt empowered to work toward those goals.
• Only 20 percent fully trusted the company they worked for.
Imagine if this were your team. Less than half of your staff would know exactly what they were supposed to be doing. One in five would be excited about their job. One in five would be sure about what they were supposed to be doing at work, and in any case, fewer than one in five would feel trusted enough to work toward the goals that they didn't understand in the first place. And the really painful kicker is that one in five wouldn't even trust the leadership team enough to care if they won or if they lost to the competition.
How would you feel about being on a team like that? How would you feel if you were the coach of a team like that? Are you sure that you're not?
If you want to build an amazing team, it may require a shift in thinking about your own role. We often use the term manager to describe someone who is in charge of people. However, this term reinforces the illusion that people can, in fact, be "managed." We need to begin to think of ourselves as leaders or, better yet, coaches.
A manager builds, streamlines, and monitors systems and processes. A manager works with things, because things — such as inventory levels, food and labor costs, allocation of capital, or product quality — can be managed. You can manage things, but people are inherently unmanageable. They are filled with unruly emotions and personal problems, and, even though they may have the skills you need, can display an amazing range and variety of attitudes. People require leaders.
Most weak "people managers" view the people side of their role as a noose around their neck that they would love to be able to slide out of. They don't realize that "who" questions are always more important than "what" questions. In truth, you can't be a people manager. You can only be a poor leader who leads people badly, or a good one who leads people well.
You've gotten this far, so it's clear which one you want to be, so let's get started on the journey.
People Action Steps
• Find the best possible players for your team.
• Tell them clearly what they need to do in order to win in their role.
• Let them know how they're doing and coach them on a regular basis.
In Summary
• If you can build a team of "stars" all rowing in the same direction, you can dominate any industry.
• Companies that do the hard work of finding star players for every key seat are much more profitable than those that don't. It's the first and most important step on the path to achieving results up to three times those of your closest competitor.
• Learning to hire and retain stars is the key to winning in your business.
• You can't manage people. You can only lead them well or badly.
CHAPTER 2Determine Whether You Have Stars (or Not)
"I like Tom. He doesn't do a lot of work around here. He shows zero initiative. He's not a team player. He's never wanted to go that extra mile. Tom is exactly what I'm looking for in a government employee."
— Ron Swanson, fictional character in Parks and Recreation
Like every school in North America at the time, my junior high school had a simple method of determining who played for the school sports teams and who didn't. We formed teams in physed class; went out to the baseball diamond, basketball court, hockey rink, or volleyball court; and tried our hand at playing the various games. The most talented kids couldn't help but see that they were gifted in their sport and worked their hardest to be the best of the best in the school. These kids became the backbone of the school's competitive teams.
Among the kids with average levels of talent, some were motivated to try out for the school teams and work their hardest to get better and raise their level of play. Others belonging to the middle pack were content to play at an intramural level, just for the fun of the sport.
Then there were the 10 percent of kids who made the top 90 percent possible: the truly terrible athletes. I have good intel on this group, as I served as their poster boy throughout my school years. Membership requirements of this group included (but were not limited to): • Proudly wearing a yellow "participant" ribbon, given to everyone with any level of brain function who decided to show up at the annual track meet.
• Being hit in the head with various balls due to distractions (such as watching clouds or fantasizing about which superhero would have the best chance of overpowering Superman [answer: none]).
• Enduring the leaden stares of team members when we were assigned to their team in gym class.
Ultimately, the job of members of this group was to sit in the stands and cheer — and find something else to do that we were good at.
Today, this method is viewed as cruel by the crowd that awards a "winner" ribbon to everyone — whether the participant came in first or 10th — but I disagree. Not being a winner in sports actually helped me to focus on what I was great at and had passion for, and that was music. I saved my money to see many (now-dead) jazz greats in concert, competed at a regional and national level, and acquired a skill that's still a joy to me.
We're all good at different things. If a person isn't the right fit in his current role, that's likely a sign that there is a job he will be great at — somewhere else.
For a variety of reasons, if you're like most leaders, you tend to grade your people higher than they really are. It may be because you're afraid to see them hurt because they're such nice people, or that you see yourself as a nice person who wouldn't dream of causing pain to another. Maybe it's because assigning a lower grade would force you to have some hard, maybe unpleasant, conversations resulting in you not being liked anymore.
We'll deal head-on with some of these fears in Chapter 4, but for now, suffice it to say that not being honest with yourself about the performance of each of your team members doesn't help you, doesn't help them, and ensures that the performance of the whole team will suffer.
The 4 Essential Questions
Let's try completing a simple, honest assessment of each of your key people. Write down the names of these main players, and ask yourself the following four questions about each one.
1. If you could do it all over again, would you rehire her?
2. Does he take your stress away?
3. How would you feel if she quit?
4. What if everyone in your business was just like him?
1. If You Could Do It All Over Again, Would You Rehire Her?
Knowing what you know now, if you could go back in time to when you made your initial hiring decision, would you rehire her and be excited to do so? In this thought experiment, you get to do a complete do-over. There are no consequences to deal with. You don't have to review the history of why you made the decision you did at the time. You don't have to think through questions of replacing the person or face the prospect of potentially painful conversations in the future. Just cut through the clutter and answer the question: would you rehire if you could do it over?
The mark of a star is that you answer with a resounding YES! to this question every time.
2. Does He Take Your Stress Away?
With that person in the role, does your stress evaporate? Do you go home relaxed in the knowledge that everything's covered now that he's on the job, or do you worry about what he's doing? Do you double-check his work before it goes out? Do you create systems for him so his mistakes will be caught (by you or someone else)?
You know that you're carrying someone else's stress when you go home and think about issues he should be thinking about. The reason you hired him in the first place, and continue to pay him now, is so he will do his job and you won't have to think about it anymore. Why should you pay someone to do a job and still carry part of the load and stress of that job? It just doesn't make sense.
Have you been accused of being a poor delegator? Maybe the issue isn't your skill in delegation, but the calibre of person you are choosing. I find that even natural micro-managers find it much easier to let go when they're relinquishing an important task to someone who has shown a history of caring about the job as much as they do and of getting results. A reluctance to delegate often reflects on your experience: you've been burned in the past by delegating to the wrong person.
When a star is in charge, you relax; you're confident that he will take care of it.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Power of People Skills"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Trevor Throness.
Excerpted by permission of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction,
Chapter 1 Attracting Stars Is Lucrative — and So Much More,
Chapter 2 Determine Whether You Have Stars (or Not),
Chapter 3 Distill the Right Attitudes — and Make Them Stick,
Chapter 4 Take Action With Your Underperformers,
Chapter 5 Use the Star Chart to Rate Your Current Team,
Chapter 6 Dispel the People Myths That Most Affect Your Company,
Chapter 7 Identify Problems That Might Cause Your Stars to Leave,
Chapter 8 Reward and Develop Your Stars (The "A Box"),
Chapter 9 Coach Your Potential Stars (The "B Box"),
Chapter 10 Navigate the Wrong Fits (The "C Box"),
Chapter 11 Deal With Your Productive-but-Difficults (The "D" Box),
Chapter 12 Learn Team Leadership Skills From Parenting,
Chapter 13 Help Everyone Be Their Best,
Chapter 14 Master the Coach and Connect Concept,
Chapter 15 Handle Those Tough HR Conversations,
Conclusion: Career Lessons From Trevor,
Notes,
Index,
About the Author,