"We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature." – Edmund Burke
As a leader, you are charged with getting results from your organization, meeting or exceeding your goals and objectives, all while positioning yourself and your organization for future success.
Positioning for the future is about seeing what is coming next and reacting to it. It’s about a vision for the future, not based on the past, but based on what is coming next. It’s about preparing for change before you actually know what the change is.
Being a leader means guiding yourself and your team through constant change. You see, progress is not possible without change. Growth is not possible without change. Improved results are not possible without change. For centuries experts have agreed that the only certainties in life are death, taxes….. and change. (With apologies to Ben Franklin.)
Since everyone agrees that change is inevitable, the only question for you is, “Will you be the one driving the change, or will the change run over you?”
Sounds simple, doesn’t it?
But it is not. One of the fascinating things about working with DISC (see DISC blog entries) is that it helps us to understand not only people's behaviors, but also their goals, motivations, and fears. And within the US population a full 69% of the people have a fear of change.
69% … that’s a lot of people. And guess who they work for?
This means that as you are looking to the future and thinking about next steps, the people who are working for you are thinking about the present and how to keep things going the way they are. They like stability and knowing what is going to happen next. It’s not that their fear of change is an overwhelming, paralyzing fear. Instead it could be described as trepidation over what might go wrong and a desire to make sure that those bad things don’t happen.
For many leaders, they don’t understand this natural fear of change, but they do pick up on the fact that their staff are happy and content with the way things are going and don’t see a need for change. Sometimes this observation leads to a belief that things really are ok the way they are and can sidetrack the leader from doing what needs to be done.
But let us spend a few moments explaining some of the other truisms about change. Because while change is inevitable, and while growth cannot happen without change, that should not imply that ALL change is necessarily good or that change automatically means growth.
It doesn’t.
As the leader, your job is to identify which growth is positive and which is not; which change is necessary and which is not; which change will result in growth and which will not. You must study change, analyze it, and when necessary, embrace it. Making the right decisions on which changes to support and which ones not to support is a delineator between a good leader and a great one.
Making the decisions on change will determine whether you are driving the change and being the leader, or if you will be a bystander and be run over by it.
At ECI Learning Systems LLC, we are dedicated to helping companies get the greatest return from their most valuable asset: their employees. We work with you to align 3 key organizational factors:
• Your Company Culture
• The Leadership Styles of your key managers
• The Expectations of your Employees
When these 3 factors are aligned, you create an energy in your company that improves productivity, reduces absenteeism, increases creativity, and positively impacts your bottom line. Contact ECI Learning Systems LLC today to get your free Workplace Evaluation.
Until next time.....
Dave Meyer
ECI Learning Systems, LLC
http://www.ecilearning.com/
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Is Everybody Happy?
As a young leader I was very focused on getting results (see Background and History). Getting results is all that I was focused on because getting results meant getting ahead. Later I realized the value in engaging the people around me because it allowed me to get even more results; all the while improving morale and creating a loyalty that helped me get through some very tough times. In fact, it would be impossible to overestimate the value of the loyalty that was created. My loyal employees not only stopped me from doing some dumb things, but they sacrificed their personal time and put in some Herculean efforts to make things happen to make me look good.
As I got better as a leader and saw my people going above and beyond the call of duty to make things happen, I developed a belief that part of my job was making my employees “happy”. Now, there’s nothing wrong with making people happy. I mean, I would not want to take the opposite view and believe that my job was to make people unhappy, but the more I tried to make people happy the more challenging and confusing my role became. I would gather key people together before making a big decision to get their input. And then I would try to incorporate as many of their ideas as possible into a solution. My belief was that as I incorporated their ideas into the final solution that they would buy into the idea and work harder to implement the changes, thereby making everybody happy while solving the problem.
But I was wrong.
You see, as a leader you must realize that you cannot, and should not, try and make everyone happy. “Making everyone happy” is the job description of a comedian, not a leader. The more I tried to make everyone happy, the more confusing the solutions became. And sometimes by melding too many ideas together we lost the impact that could come from a simpler solution. We also lost speed of implementation, and, therefore, created more customer impact then we intended. Instead of analyzing a problem, identifying the best solution, and implementing it, I would dilute a good solution with ideas from others just to show them that I valued their opinion. Or worse, when it came time for something to change (and something always needs to change) I would become more focused on how to make sure that everyone was happy with the change rather than making sure that the change was properly thought out, properly planned, and properly implemented.
All of these troubles were caused by my belief that leadership meant making people happy so that they would work harder.
But people don’t work harder when they are “happy”. They work harder when they are engaged, when they believe in you and the mission, and they believe that you are doing what you believe is best.
Eventually I realized that my employees were smarter than I was giving them credit for. They didn’t need to see THEIR solution implemented. They needed to see the BEST solution implemented. They needed to know that I could analyze the possibilities, identify the direction, and communicate that clearly to the team.
Here is the question for you?
Are you focused on finding the right solutions, or are you focused on making people happy? If you really want to get the most from your team, focus on getting your team engaged by creating and implementing the best solutions, not the most popular ones.
At ECI Learning Systems LLC, we are dedicated to helping companies get the greatest return from their most valuable asset: their employees. We work with you to align 3 key organizational factors:
• Your Company Culture
• The Leadership Styles of your key managers
• The Expectations of your Employees
When these 3 factors are aligned, you create an energy in your company that improves productivity, reduces absenteeism, increases creativity, and positively impacts your bottom line. Contact ECI Learning Systems LLC today to get your free Workplace Evaluation.
Until next time.....
Dave Meyer
ECI Learning Systems, LLC
http://www.ecilearning.com/
As I got better as a leader and saw my people going above and beyond the call of duty to make things happen, I developed a belief that part of my job was making my employees “happy”. Now, there’s nothing wrong with making people happy. I mean, I would not want to take the opposite view and believe that my job was to make people unhappy, but the more I tried to make people happy the more challenging and confusing my role became. I would gather key people together before making a big decision to get their input. And then I would try to incorporate as many of their ideas as possible into a solution. My belief was that as I incorporated their ideas into the final solution that they would buy into the idea and work harder to implement the changes, thereby making everybody happy while solving the problem.
But I was wrong.
You see, as a leader you must realize that you cannot, and should not, try and make everyone happy. “Making everyone happy” is the job description of a comedian, not a leader. The more I tried to make everyone happy, the more confusing the solutions became. And sometimes by melding too many ideas together we lost the impact that could come from a simpler solution. We also lost speed of implementation, and, therefore, created more customer impact then we intended. Instead of analyzing a problem, identifying the best solution, and implementing it, I would dilute a good solution with ideas from others just to show them that I valued their opinion. Or worse, when it came time for something to change (and something always needs to change) I would become more focused on how to make sure that everyone was happy with the change rather than making sure that the change was properly thought out, properly planned, and properly implemented.
All of these troubles were caused by my belief that leadership meant making people happy so that they would work harder.
But people don’t work harder when they are “happy”. They work harder when they are engaged, when they believe in you and the mission, and they believe that you are doing what you believe is best.
Eventually I realized that my employees were smarter than I was giving them credit for. They didn’t need to see THEIR solution implemented. They needed to see the BEST solution implemented. They needed to know that I could analyze the possibilities, identify the direction, and communicate that clearly to the team.
Here is the question for you?
Are you focused on finding the right solutions, or are you focused on making people happy? If you really want to get the most from your team, focus on getting your team engaged by creating and implementing the best solutions, not the most popular ones.
At ECI Learning Systems LLC, we are dedicated to helping companies get the greatest return from their most valuable asset: their employees. We work with you to align 3 key organizational factors:
• Your Company Culture
• The Leadership Styles of your key managers
• The Expectations of your Employees
When these 3 factors are aligned, you create an energy in your company that improves productivity, reduces absenteeism, increases creativity, and positively impacts your bottom line. Contact ECI Learning Systems LLC today to get your free Workplace Evaluation.
Until next time.....
Dave Meyer
ECI Learning Systems, LLC
http://www.ecilearning.com/
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
3 Questions To Ask A Leader
The more you study leadership, the more you realize that leadership has more questions than answers. There are literally thousands of books that you can read about what leadership is, the qualities of a great leader, and even the official “laws of leadership”. And while there are a variety of styles of leadership, most of these books say the same things in slightly different ways. Because there really aren’t any new ideas in leadership, just new presentations of ideas that have been around for thousands of years.
As much as many of us lead, we are also followers. We follow a boss at work or a minister at church. We may even follow a friend in our social life, taking the lead from them as to what music we listen to, what TV shows we watch and what books to read. As a student of leadership I find that I have certain authors or experts that I tend to follow and others that I don’t. Some of this comes down to their style of leadership, or the way they present their thoughts. Some of their material resonates with me, other material sounds contrived and insincere.
This whole process of being a follower got me thinking about the basics of leadership. I thought back to the leaders that I had been associated with in my career. Some of those were exceptional leaders that I took pride in following. In some way these leaders inspired me. Others were leaders in name only. They failed to inspire me. I only followed these leaders because I had to, and frankly did as little as possible to support them. Sometimes I had a choice as to which leader to follow. Other times, I was given an assignment and the leader was already in place.
Why did I follow certain leaders, but not others? Thinking back I found that these exceptional leaders had some traits in common that made me want to follow them. I didn’t recognize these traits so much at the time, but in retrospect it is clear that if I could have asked my potential leaders some questions I would have known up front whether or not they would qualify as exceptional leaders.
Here are the three questions I would have asked:
Where are you going?
How will you get there?
Why should I trust you?
The first question is a question of vision. If you are to lead me, where will you lead me? Do you have a destination in mind? Do you know what you are trying to accomplish? Am I able to buy into this vision as something that I find good and meaningful? How will we know when we have arrived?
That may sound like a lot of questions built into one, and it is. But a good response to the question of “Where are you going?” would not only build confidence in the followers, but serve as guidepost for our decisions.
The second question is much more tactical. “How will you get there?” tells me about your value systems, what you believe is important, and your style of leadership. Do you believe that you will pick us up on your shoulders and carry us to our destination? Or will we work together as a team, utilizing all of the resources available to us to achieve our objectives. If you thought that you could carry us there on your own, I knew that you did not value your team members, would not seek counsel or advice, and would be inclined to make mistakes of omission in the process. To me, the question of “How will you get there?” was as important if not more important than the question of “Where are you going?”
Lastly, I would want to know what this leader is going to do to demonstrate to me that I should trust them. Any discussion about trust always starts with what a person says. But more important than what a person says is what a person does. Trust does not come from your words, but from your actions. Tell me I should trust you and I will pause in thought. Show me I can trust you and I will follow you.
These are the three questions that I would want to ask anyone who might be a potential leader for me. What three questions would you ask?
At ECI Learning Systems LLC, we are dedicated to helping companies get the greatest return from their most valuable asset: their employees. We work with you to align 3 key organizational factors:
• Your Company Culture
• The Leadership Styles of your key managers
• The Expectations of your Employees
When these 3 factors are aligned, you create an energy in your company that improves productivity, reduces absenteeism, increases creativity, and positively impacts your bottom line. Contact ECI Learning Systems LLC today to get your free Workplace Evaluation.
Until next time.....
Dave Meyer
ECI Learning Systems, LLC
http://www.ecilearning.com/
As much as many of us lead, we are also followers. We follow a boss at work or a minister at church. We may even follow a friend in our social life, taking the lead from them as to what music we listen to, what TV shows we watch and what books to read. As a student of leadership I find that I have certain authors or experts that I tend to follow and others that I don’t. Some of this comes down to their style of leadership, or the way they present their thoughts. Some of their material resonates with me, other material sounds contrived and insincere.
This whole process of being a follower got me thinking about the basics of leadership. I thought back to the leaders that I had been associated with in my career. Some of those were exceptional leaders that I took pride in following. In some way these leaders inspired me. Others were leaders in name only. They failed to inspire me. I only followed these leaders because I had to, and frankly did as little as possible to support them. Sometimes I had a choice as to which leader to follow. Other times, I was given an assignment and the leader was already in place.
Why did I follow certain leaders, but not others? Thinking back I found that these exceptional leaders had some traits in common that made me want to follow them. I didn’t recognize these traits so much at the time, but in retrospect it is clear that if I could have asked my potential leaders some questions I would have known up front whether or not they would qualify as exceptional leaders.
Here are the three questions I would have asked:
Where are you going?
How will you get there?
Why should I trust you?
The first question is a question of vision. If you are to lead me, where will you lead me? Do you have a destination in mind? Do you know what you are trying to accomplish? Am I able to buy into this vision as something that I find good and meaningful? How will we know when we have arrived?
That may sound like a lot of questions built into one, and it is. But a good response to the question of “Where are you going?” would not only build confidence in the followers, but serve as guidepost for our decisions.
The second question is much more tactical. “How will you get there?” tells me about your value systems, what you believe is important, and your style of leadership. Do you believe that you will pick us up on your shoulders and carry us to our destination? Or will we work together as a team, utilizing all of the resources available to us to achieve our objectives. If you thought that you could carry us there on your own, I knew that you did not value your team members, would not seek counsel or advice, and would be inclined to make mistakes of omission in the process. To me, the question of “How will you get there?” was as important if not more important than the question of “Where are you going?”
Lastly, I would want to know what this leader is going to do to demonstrate to me that I should trust them. Any discussion about trust always starts with what a person says. But more important than what a person says is what a person does. Trust does not come from your words, but from your actions. Tell me I should trust you and I will pause in thought. Show me I can trust you and I will follow you.
These are the three questions that I would want to ask anyone who might be a potential leader for me. What three questions would you ask?
At ECI Learning Systems LLC, we are dedicated to helping companies get the greatest return from their most valuable asset: their employees. We work with you to align 3 key organizational factors:
• Your Company Culture
• The Leadership Styles of your key managers
• The Expectations of your Employees
When these 3 factors are aligned, you create an energy in your company that improves productivity, reduces absenteeism, increases creativity, and positively impacts your bottom line. Contact ECI Learning Systems LLC today to get your free Workplace Evaluation.
Until next time.....
Dave Meyer
ECI Learning Systems, LLC
http://www.ecilearning.com/
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Why Don't More Companies Engage Their Employees?
I’ve written a couple of articles about the importance of Employee Engagement and how it can bring positive results to the bottom line. Many people read the articles and comment about how great it sounds to work for a company like that, but they say that their company doesn’t care about the concept. With all of the bottom line impact from Employee Engagement, it makes one wonder why more companies don’t apply more focus to the concept.
That really is a great question and one that deserves a really good answer.
Unfortunately, I don’t have one.
When I speak with executives at any level about the concept of Employee Engagement, they all seem to understand the concept. They smile; they nod their heads; they make an intelligent comment or two; and then they move the discussion some place else.
Are they afraid of what a discussion about Employee Engagement might reveal about them or their company? Are they concerned that I might move from a discussion into a sales pitch? Or do they really not understand where Employee Engagement fits into their role and into their organization?
The executives that I speak with are generally bright, intelligent people. They understand the complexities of running their own business, the complexities of financial statements that come from their accountants, and they certainly understand the technical aspects of their business. In other words, they understand all of the “things” associated with their business. What they seem to lack is a clear understanding of the impact that people, both ordinary and extraordinary, have on their business.
For most executives, their careers started out much the way mine did (see Background and History on the blog site). They find themselves rewarded for getting results and having success in their jobs. As they progress up the career ladder they get better at doing the things that they already do best. But they don’t get better at the skills that separate average executives from top-notch executives; engaging and inspiring their people.
Sometimes you will find a progressive executive who has done some reading on Employee Engagement, but has never really experienced it firsthand. Since they are anxious to learn new things and apply them to the business, and since they see the value of Employee Engagement they do what comes natural to them.
They delegate it to someone else.
The receiving party is generally the VP of Human Resources. Logical, right? After all, the Human Resources department is focused on people and this is a people issue. He may even ask for reports to measure “how that whole Employee Engagement thing” is coming along. And the VP of HR then sometimes implements something like an Organizational Survey to measure the level of Employee Engagement, thereby furthering the myth that Employee Engagement can be delegated.
Employee Engagement starts at the top of the organization with a strong commitment to delivering world class products and services. With that comes a pledge to ensuring that every employee is dedicated to, and believes in, the same concept. This is how Employee Engagement gets started.
At ECI Learning Systems LLC, we are dedicated to helping companies get the greatest return from their most valuable asset: their employees. We work with you to align 3 key organizational factors:
• Your Company Culture
• The Leadership Styles of your key managers
• The Expectations of your Employees
When these 3 factors are aligned, you create an energy in your company that improves productivity, reduces absenteeism, increases creativity, and positively impacts your bottom line. Contact ECI Learning Systems LLC today to get your free Workplace Evaluation.
Until next time.....
Dave Meyer
ECI Learning Systems, LLC
http://www.ecilearning.com/
That really is a great question and one that deserves a really good answer.
Unfortunately, I don’t have one.
When I speak with executives at any level about the concept of Employee Engagement, they all seem to understand the concept. They smile; they nod their heads; they make an intelligent comment or two; and then they move the discussion some place else.
Are they afraid of what a discussion about Employee Engagement might reveal about them or their company? Are they concerned that I might move from a discussion into a sales pitch? Or do they really not understand where Employee Engagement fits into their role and into their organization?
The executives that I speak with are generally bright, intelligent people. They understand the complexities of running their own business, the complexities of financial statements that come from their accountants, and they certainly understand the technical aspects of their business. In other words, they understand all of the “things” associated with their business. What they seem to lack is a clear understanding of the impact that people, both ordinary and extraordinary, have on their business.
For most executives, their careers started out much the way mine did (see Background and History on the blog site). They find themselves rewarded for getting results and having success in their jobs. As they progress up the career ladder they get better at doing the things that they already do best. But they don’t get better at the skills that separate average executives from top-notch executives; engaging and inspiring their people.
Sometimes you will find a progressive executive who has done some reading on Employee Engagement, but has never really experienced it firsthand. Since they are anxious to learn new things and apply them to the business, and since they see the value of Employee Engagement they do what comes natural to them.
They delegate it to someone else.
The receiving party is generally the VP of Human Resources. Logical, right? After all, the Human Resources department is focused on people and this is a people issue. He may even ask for reports to measure “how that whole Employee Engagement thing” is coming along. And the VP of HR then sometimes implements something like an Organizational Survey to measure the level of Employee Engagement, thereby furthering the myth that Employee Engagement can be delegated.
Employee Engagement starts at the top of the organization with a strong commitment to delivering world class products and services. With that comes a pledge to ensuring that every employee is dedicated to, and believes in, the same concept. This is how Employee Engagement gets started.
At ECI Learning Systems LLC, we are dedicated to helping companies get the greatest return from their most valuable asset: their employees. We work with you to align 3 key organizational factors:
• Your Company Culture
• The Leadership Styles of your key managers
• The Expectations of your Employees
When these 3 factors are aligned, you create an energy in your company that improves productivity, reduces absenteeism, increases creativity, and positively impacts your bottom line. Contact ECI Learning Systems LLC today to get your free Workplace Evaluation.
Until next time.....
Dave Meyer
ECI Learning Systems, LLC
http://www.ecilearning.com/
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