Coaching a Direct Report Who Asks for Your Help

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by Deborah Grayson Riegel

 

 

Evolution has made humans helpful. We have evolved as a species to be “prosocial,” behaving in ways that are positive, helpful, and intended to promote social acceptance, connection, and friendship. Asking for, offering, and receiving help have aided our long-term survival.

That being said, there is a difference between being inclined to help someone and knowing what kind of help that person wants or needs. As a leader, you play an important role in helping others in a way that doesn’t rob them of their autonomy and ownership (micromanaging) or leave them wondering what they’re supposed to do next (under-leading).

One area where this tension often shows up is when a direct report asks for help. What’s the most effective way to offer your support? How can you help them cross the bridge between goal setting and goal attainment?

Telling someone exactly what steps they need to take to cross that bridge may make sense when they’re just starting in a new role, with a new project, or if there’s only one right way to get it done correctly. However, when someone has a small measure of experience under their belt, your role is to help them consider and design those next steps for themselves. As a result, they’re much more likely to commit to the plan they’ve created.

Here’s what micromanaging a plan might sound like: Continue reading →

Why being a highly sensitive person could be your greatest professional asset

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BY MELODY WILDING

 

Meet Darren, a senior director at a large education company. Warm and kindhearted, Darren is the type of leader who takes you out to lunch when you have a bad day and listens to clients and their needs. This is different from other leaders at his organization who lead in a highly critical style and are always out for the sale. 

What differentiates Darren from his peers is that he is a highly sensitive person (HSP). This term has recently become more common and refers to about 20% of the population who process the world more deeply. In fact, research points to over 10 gene variants connected with the trait. This means that the brains of highly sensitive people process neurochemicals like serotonin and dopamine differently, leading to benefits such as increased perceptiveness, creativity, and careful decision-making. 

High sensitivity goes beyond empathy alone. Psychologist Dr. Elaine Aron, who first discovered the trait, has suggested that it evolved as an “innate survival strategy,” to stay free from harm in prehistoric times. Pausing and observing––a hallmark of high sensitivity––helped these individuals make wiser decisions by picking up on environmental cues and recognizing things that less-sensitive people didn’t.

While we may no longer need to avoid dangers in the wild, high sensitivity is still an invaluable trait: Managers consistently rate people with higher sensitivity as their top contributors. Yet it’s common for highly sensitive people to struggle with confidence, assuming their qualities make them weird, weak, or fragile. In my own 10 years of coaching sensitive leaders, I can tell you firsthand that it is possible to transform your ability to think and feel deeply into an advantage in the workplace. Here are five ways HSPs can leverage their strengths at work.

Continue reading →

Purposeful work: the secret weapon in the new war for talent

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By Michael Mankins, Eric Garton, and Dan Schwartz

 

The post-pandemic job market has proved vexing for many employers. Starting in mid-2021, a record number of workers quit their jobs, providing evidence for what many were already calling “The Great Resignation.” Companies scrambled to retain workers and cope with critical labor shortages. In their haste to respond, however, many firms pursued strategies that employees did not value and that had little impact on employee retention. The result: Even in today’s contracting economies, quit rates have remained at historically high levels.

We’re not surprised by the poor results. Research indicates that the primary driver of today’s high attrition rates is the growing disenchantment most employees feel toward work. Increasingly, work is seen as purposeless, having little value or meaning to employees. The push for greater efficiency and standardization has left many workers jaded, bored in their jobs, disconnected from coworkers, and not particularly loyal to their employers.

The failure of most employee retention strategies stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of what motivates most of us to work—namely, engagement in the work that we do (see Figure 1). Sure, we want the basics. We want to feel safe in the workplace, have the resources we need to be productive, be rewarded fairly, and have some flexibility in where, when, and how we do our jobs. But these are merely “qualifiers.” They can make the difference between employees being satisfied or dissatisfied, but they are not enough to create high levels of engagement, loyalty, and retention.

The failed ground and air wars for talent
In the aftermath of Covid-19, many companies are fighting “the ground war” for talent. They are boosting pay, offering greater flexibility, and modifying other “qualifiers” to retain their best people. In most cases, these tactics haven’t done much to move the needle on worker attrition. Why? These moves are undifferentiated and easily matched. Any company can change its pay structure, work-from-home policies, and other qualifiers in response to tight labor markets. But so, too, can its competitors. Any gains are fleeting.

A recent Harris Poll survey indicates that 20% of employees who left their jobs in 2021 for better pay and/or greater flexibility now regret their decision. Many report that they plan to leave their new job and return to their prior employer or find another job. So far, the ground war has produced a swirl of employees moving from one company to another, but it hasn’t had much impact on aggregate quit rates. These tactics have done little more than cast “the great resignation” as “the great reshuffling.” Continue reading →

How remote and hybrid work broke performance reviews.

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BY DAVID MURRAY

The swing to remote and hybrid work demands a new approach to the employee-performance review, says this founder of an HR tech startup.

 

 

There is a theory called “Dunbar’s number” that the maximum number of people we can really know or relationships we can really manage is 150.

Executives know when it comes to running a high-functioning business, they need to foster keystone people and manage out anyone who isn’t working out. To do that, they need to really know the people who work at their company. In an office, proximity can give them a good sense of that—they see who’s going to meetings, who’s got people stopping by their desk, and who gets chatted up at the water cooler. So, according to Dunbar’s number, that means that up until a company reaches roughly 150 employees, in an in-person workplace, the executives probably have a decent grasp on who everyone is, roughly what they do, and how they’re performing.

But when a company moves to remote or hybrid work, CEOs and other executives lose that peripheral vision—they only see who they’re actively in meetings with. And that Dunbar’s number shrinks; some theorize it changes to about 50.

With remote and hybrid work, it becomes very difficult for executives to really know all of their employees well enough to become the sole source of information on their performance and contribution to the company. And, unfortunately, most traditional performance reviews take a top-down, hierarchical approach, where feedback on performance is based on a single manager’s opinion and, possibly, cherry-picked 360 peer reviews (input from colleagues, peers, underlings, etc).

Continue reading →

Leadership

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Early in the pandemic, Josh Bersin called it the Big Reset: “The Coronavirus is accelerating one of the biggest business transformations in decades.”

As the business landscape evolves and employees reassess their priorities, leadership is changing as well. To reset thinking on what it means to be a leader today, we asked Josh Bersin and other thought and business leaders for their perspective.

 

  • Great Leadership is about getting the best out of your team, by allowing team members to play roles where their superpowers can enhance the work of others!

-Michael McDaniel, President, Modern Workplace, DXC Technology

 

  • Competence – you can’t fake it, know the details of what is going on around you.  If you don’t know something, ask the questions and do the research to learn it.
  • Calmness – when the chips are down, and they will be at some point, leaders need to maintain calmness, showing empathy for people who are trying to do the right thing, clinically remove the people who aren’t, and set an example for a culture of respect, integrity all while not compromising on the vision and objectives of the business.
  • Creating the conditions for success – if your organization is succeeding in spite of itself (which with enough brute force can happen), then that is a leadership issue.  Focus on eliminating roadblocks, complexity and any other impediments for your organization to succeed.

-Mark Trepanier

 

  • I hear collaboration used more than teamwork now a days. Professionals need to work not only with their team but others in the organization too.  Empathy is a very strong theme with the employees having a larger pull and due to the pandemic. It’s a sign of the times and one I hope remains important for years to come.  Great leadership is effective when it is trusted and loyal. I think communicating a vision, establishing attainable and challenging goals, then rewarding them is a big part of being a leader. Great leadership is effective for the people and in turn the business.

-Jenny Illum, Director, Executive Recruiting & Diversity Recruitment. Bath & Body            Works

 

If you’re inspired by these perspectives on leadership today, stay tuned…there’s more to come!  And if you are interested in crafting your own contribution, please email me at janis@issg.net