How owners and managers hurt employee performance

Most discussions of management and leadership talk about what to do to help people be their best. Here are six ways executives and entrepreneurs routinely do the opposite.

1)They don’t provide a vision for the company.

Today, most companies have a vision, and most of these visions wind up as nicely written statements on wooden plaques. These are the “visions and missions” employees scoff at. But without a clear and compelling company direction, employees have no real freedom of action. Without a north star to follow, the best they can do is what they are told - a rather low performance position.

Everyone knows executives need a vision, but it is not just having a vision that’s important, it is sharing the vision, bringing people into the vision, bringing that vision alive–which makes the real performance difference. When people align with themselves with the company goals, they are free to invent, to improvise, to innovate, to inspire each other. They are free to do great work.

2)Saying things once thinking that’s enough.

Many executives think that if they say something once, it needn’t to be said again. Wrong, wrong, wrong! Should I say that another way? People forget. Don’t you? People don’t listen. Do you hear everything that’s said? People don’t understand everything the first time. Did you ever hear something in passing and not know what it meant?

If something is important, it bears repeating. And repeating. This goes doubly–perhaps trebly–for sharing a vision. Repeat it over and over again. Repeat until you are sick of hearing yourself say it. Reiterate those goals. Restate the product strategy. Revisit the customer care policy. Repeat everything important.

3)They don’t hold employees accountable.

Do the people in your company keep their word? Do they say what they will do and then do it? When you ask someone to do a job and they commit to getting it done, in a certain way, by a certain time, do you expect action? Do you expect results? Of course, but do you follow up? Do you make sure? Either people are held accountable or they aren’t. Either they keep their word or they don’t.

Accountability is built into the culture. People need to know you expect them to do the things they say they’ll do. Otherwise, anything that is perceived to have a higher priority, or worse–anything that is easier to accomplish– will get done instead. It’s that simple. Start by doing all the things you said you would do. Then make sure everyone else does. This will pass through your organization like a virus.

4)They try to improve people’s weaknesses.

You think, “If only they did such-and-such, they’d be perfect.” So you set out to improve someone’s weakness, testing them, evaluating them, training them, trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Don’t. Don’t worry about weaknesses–instead, figure out what they are already really good at and train them to be brilliant. Not only does this create more value for your company, it is far easier.

Wouldn’t you rather have a brilliant salesperson who was poor at customer service, or a brilliant field engineer who couldn’t fill out a report to save their life? Sure, it might mean a few more staff positions, but so what–each person is performing at the maximum in one thing that makes you money, instead of wasting time doing all those other things poorly.

5)They keep people in the wrong jobs.

You start with a great performer–an employee who is smart and effective. Then you have an open position, and naturally slip that great performer into the open position, thinking, “They’re smart, they can handle it.” The difficulty comes when that great performer doesn’t perform, and out of loyalty, inertia or a simple unwillingness to admit mistakes, you leave them in place–causing great harm to both the employee and the company. Their poor performance totally ruins their self-esteem and harms the performance of those around them. They know they aren’t contributing at a high level and finally they leave, or you fire them.

Are there people in your company who could perform better in a different position? Are there employees in your company who are simply not performing at all? Do them and everyone else a favor. Move them or ask them to leave. Quickly.

6)They change goals and direction informally, and never it official.

Flexibility is critical to your success in today’s fast paced ever-changing world, but when you decide to change direction, make it official. Why? If you don’t announce new goals, and admit you are no longer pursuing the previous ones, it becomes too easy to slip and slide from one set of objectives to another. Management loses credibility, accountability suffers, and your company develops the culture I call “The Path of Least Resistance.” Your people model this behavior- they slip their own goals without telling anyone, and start to do whatever’s easiest. And it’s all right, because no one was serious about those goals anyway. Were they? You have to make it official.

I wish these were the only ways bosses hold back employees, sadly they are not. My list currently has 23 more ways and I know I’m not done counting; I simply stopped here when I ran out of room. I’m not even sure these are the worst ways, but they are easy and productive to fix.

If you currently do any of these things–stop immediately.

Good luck.

Paul Lemberg is the president of Quantum Growth Coaching, the world’s only fully systemized business coaching program guaranteed to help entrepreneurs rapidly create More Profits and More Life(tm). To get your copy of our free special report with detailed steps on how to grow your business at least 40% faster, even when you aren’t sure what to do next, go to Paul’s business coaching website.

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There are a number of issues to consider:

Blocks to creativity and organisational culture

What are the blocks to creativity and how can they be overcome? We can all be more creative, so what is stopping us? There are many blocks such as evaluation apprehension (in its many forms) and lack of adequate finance and resources. Separating creative from critical thinking, incremental productivity, tools that draw out tacit knowledge and using frameworks to trigger flow are some of the effective unblocking techniques. What is psychological safety and freedom? What properties of an organisational culture cultivate productivity?

Organisational structure

What properties of an organisational structure most foster creativity? There are many reasons why an entity has a particular organisational structure: history, logistics, market segmentation, product line, strategy and so forth. It is often unreasonable to ask a firm to change its organisational structure, so how do we get around this problem?

Group structure

What is the most effective team structure? Many people who are acknowledged to have made great contributions to society have worked alone, but it is very easy for individuals to go “off track” and feedback is required to some degree, as well as other things. It is also very difficult to separate the idea from its influences. Many others work in pairs or small teams, as this reduces the negative effects of large groups. Successful firms generally start off as very small, creative enterprises. Many people think that brainstorming in large groups enhances creativity, but large groups bring with them politics, status differentials, group think, dilution of ideas and conformity among other things.

Learn more…

The Complete MBA dissertation on Creativity Management and other tools can be found at http://managing-creativity.com/

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Kal Bishop, MBA

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You are free to reproduce this article as long as no changes are made, the author’s name is retained and the link to our site URL remains active.

Kal Bishop is a management consultant based in London, UK. His specialities include Knowledge Management and Creativity and Innovation Management. He has consulted in the visual media and software industries and for clients such as Toshiba and Transport for London. He has led Improv, creativity and innovation workshops, exhibited artwork in San Francisco, Los Angeles and London and written a number of screenplays. He is a passionate traveller. He can be reached at http://managing-creativity.com/

You can forget about making New Year’s Resolutions if you’re hoping for a successful outcome. Most aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.

No less than Mark Twain has written of New Year’s Resolutions, “Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink, and swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter than ever.”

The biggest majority of New Year’s Resolutions have gone by the wayside before January is over and most won’t even be remembered six months later. And the reason is pretty simple: Most are made in response to something negative — a habit or situation that the person wants to change or end. And therein lies the problem - it’s hard to develop momentum from a negative response. It is always easier to move toward something rather than away from something.

Consider one of the most adopted resolutions — weight loss. No one can get excited about losing weight because it requires deprivation. It’s a negative response to concerns about appearance, health, etc. The results of weight loss Resolutions demonstrate their weakness. A 1998 survey sponsored by Gardenburger found that more than three-fourths of all women between the ages of 25 and 54 make diet and weight-loss plans each year. Nearly nine of 10 respondents reported only occasional or no success, while almost half lost little or actually gained weight instead.

The people who succeed at losing weight and maintaining the loss have usually been motivated by a dream much bigger and more positive than just losing weight. They see themselves living a healthy lifestyle. They begin to act and think like people who are in good physical shape. There’s more of a radical change in a person’s thinking and actions than you see with most resolutions. It wouldn’t be possible to effect and sustain such a radical change unless the person is motivated by a big dream that is positive in nature.

Another popular aim is to quit smoking. And I can certainly relate to that — I was a three-pack-a-day smoker until I celebrated a smoke-free New Year’s twelve years ago. For over twenty years I had tried to quit many times using every tool and technique I heard about. But as long as I was trying to quit, I couldn’t break the grip.

Instead, I developed a dream to become a non-smoker. I fell in love with the idea of breathing clean air instead of smoky air, of my body and clothes smelling nice instead of smoky. I thought about how wonderful it would be to taste food again. I decided to start acting and thinking like a non-smoker, and when the thinking took hold I simply quit smoking. In all the years since, I’ve never wanted another cigarette, never even thought about wanting one.

If you’re going to make a New Year’s Resolution this year, make one with a high probability for success. Make a Resolution to develop a life plan. Most people are in a free-fall through life, careening from one crisis to the next. They wake up one day and 10, 20, 30 or more years have passed and they’re nowhere near where they thought or hoped they’d be. Working with a life plan you’re much more apt to be excited by what the future brings even if you succeed at attaining only a small part of your plan.

A life plan should address all areas of your life including finances, health, relationships, career, spiritual and even recreational. While a lot of our focus tends to be on financial issues like increasing income or decreasing debt, or health issues like losing weight or quitting smoking, the undeniable truth is that a life lived out of balance isn’t a life of quality at all.

If you were going to build a new house and you had this idea for a fabulous master bedroom suite, you wouldn’t rush out and start building the master bedroom. You’d have a complete plan before you started. When you approach resolutions and goals in the same manner, you end up with a much better chance of achieving success.

Copyright © 2004 Vic Johnson

Vic Johnson is a popular motivational speaker, author and Internet Infopreneur who has created some of the most visited personal development sites on the Web, including the goal setting portal, http://www.Goals2005.com that features goal setting programs and software as well as weight loss, smoking cessation and debt reduction solutions.

Whenever someone gets in a position where they are excelling or making good use of time we tend to say that “we’re in a zone”. A few days ago I was on a natural high. Work I had been pushing back from completing for over a month was finally getting done. I had penciled in 3 hours to get the work accomplished, but with the pace I was working at.. everything seemed to naturally be falling into place for me. It took me just under two and a half hours to get 5 websites created. Now bear in mind that I was using a Website generation tool, where all I had to do was get the index page customized to my liking and create images to use as logos. Pretty straight forward work, providing you knew what you were doing.

That night as I watched the latest installment of CSI Las Vegas I thought to myself… I hope I can mirror what I did today and finish up some more work that I’ve been contemplating doing. After-all I had done a lot of work earlier and there was a sense of accomplishment in the air.

Fast-forward 4 days later and it’s becoming apparent that all the work I did when I was in my “zone” contained several errors. Maybe I was too much in a rush to notice the errors at the time.

Here’s what I learned..

1. Take your time when working, leaves less room for errors.

2. Double check you work as you go along so you don’t have to redo anything

3. Triple check your work when you’re finished, in my case before I uploaded my newly completed websites to my server.

4. Don’t rely heavily on scripts and programs to get your work done accurately. A machine run script can only do what you input. See 1 and 2 again.

5. If possible have a second set of eyes double check your work for you.

6. Do use little tools such as a “Spell Check” feature to verify that you don’t make silly spelling errors.

7. Always remember to recheck for formatting so your entire project looks and feels uniform.

The next time I’m in my zone I’ll be sure to verify that what I did was done correctly so I don’t have to waste time correcting simple errors that could have been avoided or corrected before they became big errors.

Chris De La Rosa is a work from home dad who’s hobby is to blog about his enitre telecommuting expperiences. http://iloveworkingfromhome.blogspot.com/