Thursday, June 30, 2011

Can You Make a Diagnosis Based on a "Pulse"?

A physician takes a pulse as a signal of an underlying symptom of something more serious, but don’t expect a physician to decide you need open heart survey just with a pulse reading. Nor should you expect that you can support the senior management team in driving growth and revenue in your organization with just a “pulse reading”.

Taking a “pulse” of the workforce falls short as far as actionability. Do you look at a score on a question and take action? Which question? What action? Is it the right action? What’s you ROI? Will it achieve your goal to improve the “pulse”? It’s impossible to take meaningful, actions on feelings, opinions, and behaviors when survey items are analyzed or interpreted without a "Main Thing".

Growth of the business is a wonderful “Main Thing”, how to drive increased shareholder value, or building a customer focused organization, or how to get physician to adopt a new EMR (emergency medical record) system-something with substance direction, financial and ROI return; meaningful to the “boss”. Sure the boss is interested if his workforce is happy, but happy people are not enough to drive a strategic financial outcome.

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Communication is Key

A well publicized survey communication plan conveys that a survey is not simply another flavor of the month exercise. Employees (and even customers) are sick and tired of answering survey questionnaires that have no visible outcome. Why waste my time when it does nothing for me? A lack of courtesy by management in not letting people know about results, or even a giving them a simple "thank you" for giving input on how management and shareholders can make more money. Seems a bit one sided.
If you want to have people respond sincerely, openly and honestly, give them the courtesy of communication with words like "please", "we need your help", "your effort has meaning to us (management) and them (What's In it For Me)", "we appreciate the time spent for honesty and we will let you know how we are doing as an organization" of which they are the MOST critical part. People want to help, you just need to know how to ask for it and show them how their feedback positively contributes to the betterment of the company. This is the key part that many people forget but it insures that our customers are satisfied.

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Managerial Development for the 21st Century

The two levels of leadership-C suite and local manager- require the same, yet also quite different needs due to their roles and responsibilities. My reference is to the local manager, as engagement is a primary responsibility to his/her workgroup.
A toxic department in the Value Chain creates opportunity for silos, waste, inefficiencies, turnover, custom issues and more. Engagement is best served at the department level, each manager has a need to become aware of their behaviors, feedback mechanisms, developmental needs, support, alignment to the people, the leadership and the organization, and more.
The need is for assessment, data, feedback tools, so managers know exactly what they need to do to adapt. Company strategies need to en nimble, but so do the managers. Managerial development for the 21st century is a key to this engagement topic. So, in practice, we capture data with diagnostic tools designed to capture and illuminate the alignment of each manager to both the workforce, and to the alignment to the business, it's customers, processes, leadership and more. Even training internal teams to help mentor the managers in larger organization have proven to be cost efficient to the client

Translating Information into Action

“If leaders know the actions to take, leaders will take that action”. This basic elementary statement is the common denominator that will solve all corporate issues and achieve corporate goals; it starts with collecting information that is translatable into knowledge and action.

The use of Infotool diagnostics allows laser precision decision making based on laser granularity of information through the lens of each demographic. The success of blueprinting precise action steps is not only based on the quality of the survey diagnostic, but the quality of the survey questions and demographic architecture. The survey instrument needs to be built around specific achievable goals of the client, and using strategic mapping, every item asked in the survey is directly correlated to the business vision. The ability to identify gaps and performance variations at each level of the organization allows curative action steps unique to each department. Using the manager as the change agent, organizations with experience continuous improvement throughout focused on the business strategy all at the same time.

Monday, June 27, 2011

Employee Engagement Should Not Start With an Exit Interview

Talk about the saying “the horse that is already out of the barn” exit surveys are designed primarily to elicit information as to why people have left an organization. Their attitudes have been tainted, their initiative has been dampened and there is no compelling reason to provide validated information upon which you can rely upon. All of that being said, if information about a manager’s behavior or skills in leading have been captured, this kind of information has merit as a measure of employee engagement.


The Conference Board’s four measures of retention drivers measure 20 reasons why most employees leave organizations – poor manager skills are the number one cause. In employee engagement surveys, always include a strong component to measure managerial skills and make sure that each manager of each department is measured.

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Engaged Employees VS Engaged Customers

On a recent project I discovered something that is the anti-research.

Gallop, Hewitt, Blessing White and many other consulting soothsayers claim that when workers are engaged, the results are high performance and greater profitability. They sell you their employee engagement program for huge bucks and you, (and they) pray that their work will bring you immeasurable wealth, happy smiling employees and all will be groovy.

We found just the opposite. An organization with high scores in engagement, great managers, low employee turnover, yet they were still losing customers, losing market share, all with a great product.

We discovered that the process in which they were delivering their goods and services to the customer were "messed up". In fact there was no process in place so everyone did their own thing. No data as to what the customers really cared about; or what happens at their "touch points."
Moral of the story-employee engagement is but a state of mind that seems to be a prerequisite for having "engaged customers."- the end game for business growth. Maybe there's a lot more to this engagement "stuff" than just the propaganda from these consulting soothsayers.

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

5 Ways to Be a Great Leader

I found this on LinkedIn and wanted to share:

What are the five ways to be a great leader?

1. Serve others – Spend your time helping your employees, partners, suppliers and clients become successful in their activities. Adding value to their lives is the most important way to shine as a leader.

2. Associate with great people – This is so important. Surround yourself with positive, motivated leaders and you will find that you will become more effective. Surrounding yourself with negative people will end up making your obstacles more difficult to overcome.

3. Help develop other leaders within your organization – When you spot someone who has what it takes to be a great leader, instead of feeling threatened, you should do everything that you can to assist them.

4. Delegate – Try not to feel like you have to prove your abilities by handling everything yourself. Teach others how to perform some of your tasks and show them how to take initiative in your business.

5. Take responsibility – This is a key trait in a great leader. A leader takes responsibility for the outcome of a project and acknowledges that he or she is ultimately responsible the success or failure of the team. If you take responsibility for your team, your team will be loyal to you.

If you follow these five suggestions, you will be well on your way to excellent leadership!