The paradox of COMMUNICATION – what it can look like when the balance between FRANKNESS and DIPLOMACY is off-kilter, and what it can look like when balance is achieved.
Leaders need to be able to balance these two seemingly opposite traits – one dynamic and one gentle – to achieve optimal behavioural performance and balanced versatility and effective communication.
What examples of leadership communication spring to your mind?
Harrison Paradox Technology is embraced by organizations world-wide as the best means to determine leadership capability and job performance by providing a reliable map of the paradoxical balances that make or break leaders.
As we begin 2018 and the uncertainty over Brexit continues companies and organisations will be positioning themselves to be at the front of the queue in markets new and/or old. The productivity equation is a simple one –
Happy, talented people create great working environments where people want to be productive!
Achieve this and you –
Promote a productive culture
Reduce absenteeism
Reduce employee attrition rates
Promote innovation and creativity
So what are the factors that make people want to work for your organisation? Here are 8 to start with –
They may have expectations for –
Development and self-improvement, challenges
Appreciation and Recognition for work achieved
Remuneration – may not be top of the pole
Communication style
Authority – autonomy, initiative, leadership
Personal expectations – being informed, wants help
Social – outgoing people often like to mix work with pleasure (or not)
Work life balance – flexible working time, stress management
If people have wants and desires in these areas and you are not providing them then they are unlikely to be fulfilled in the role and will cost you money when they leave, often after only a few short months. So what’s the answer – easy – measure them! You can do this quickly and effectively for individuals, groups and/or organisations through one simple objective on line questionnaire.
OK, so now you have measured your cultural expectations – what if they don’t fit your productivity needs? What if people aren’t happy, have no authority expectations or development expectations that are crucial to your culture? So now we look to the future to implement the changes necessary. First we need to know what they are.
Most organisations have a set of values which they display on websites and on walls around the organisation. In my experience when I ask people what they mean or even what they are, despite being displayed on the wall, they have little or no idea how to interpret them into behaviours. This is because they are written in vague language that is open to interpretation. Let me show you what I mean by the use of a simple model of alignment –
Robert Dilts’ Alignment Model based on the work of Gregory Bateson
The above Alignment Model is particularly useful when creating a change. Each level of the model impacts on the levels below it. In order to create change you would need to focus on each level and ensure each is in place in order to impact any lasting change on the levels below, which will then result in alignment.
Most organisations have a fairly clear idea of their purpose and the roles that people play within that. They also have some words to represent the values of the organisation and that’s where it stops. Those values never get translated into behaviours and therefore people are unsure of how to act them out. So what’s the answer? Again it’s simple – decide which behaviours demonstrate each value and measure them! You can use the same answer sets as for the Engagement and Retention survey – the data will just be arranged differently to align with the values. You then have the information you need to –
Measure your cultural expectations annually quickly, cost effectively and accurately
If you would like to know about how to accurately assess Engagement and Retention factors and align cultural values please call Pat on 07768 922244 or email pat@quadrant1.com.
Find out more about the Alignment Model in ‘Brilliant NLP’, co-authored by Pat Hutchinson and David Molden available here
Understanding Employee Expectations: the key to effective engagement and retention
Every year January is the month when job boards and recruitment agencies launch their “New Year, New Job” campaigns – why?
January is the busiest month for starters and leavers with the third Monday of January in particular known as Blue Monday, the one day when more employees hand in their letter of resignation than any other day in the year.
Two trends indicate 2016 will continue to be a busy year for UK recruiters:
UK labour market statistics from the CBI show the employment rate is the highest since records began in 1971 (at 73.7%) with increasing business optimism for the economic outlook;
However, research from HR Magazine suggests that effective employee engagement in the UK could be faltering with more than a third of us saying that we were not motivated at work during 2015.
Organisations with a good employee engagement and retention strategy can cascade retention and turnover KPIs to quantify the overall metrics and financial returns. However, even with these investments organisations still lose their best talent to the competition because of the limitations of high-level engagement surveys; specifically they do not look at an individual’s real engagement factors.
Asking the right questions, and analysing each individual employee’s real engagement factors ensures managers and the wider organisation provide an environment that retains the best talent. People want to feel recognised but there are other factors that need to be understood if they are to further engage in their work and the overall success of the organisation.
In this series of eight articles we provide detailed insights into each of the 8 areas of employee expectations, starting with:
Personal Expectations
Personal expectations can include areas such as being kept properly informed about what is going on in the company, having a strong and capable leader, access to help when needed and a clear career and development path. In isolation these cannot change performance and increase opportunity but combined with other engagement metrics can help managers develop more fulfilling job roles, set meaningful goals, leading to a more satisfied and productive team. Examples of personal expectations include:
Wants to be Informed
Most employees who are engaged, or want to be more so, also expect to be kept informed of what is going on in the organisation they are working for. This can be particularly problematic during times of change when, for instance, departments are being reorganised or new initiatives and products being released.
Meeting these expectations is vital for companies that want to promote better employee relations and a higher sense of well-being.
Wants Capable Leader
One of the major reasons that top talent leave a particular company is the person in charge. That could be because the employee feels unappreciated or that they are being ‘held back’ in some way and it could mean that the person in charge is simply not very good at handling people, particularly those with obvious talent. The CIPD quote a survey last year by B2B marketplace of more than a thousand employees, over a third said they thought their manager was a bad boss.
Most employees expect a manager or boss who is responsive, understanding and helps them do their job well.
Wants Personal Help
Employees will have varying expectations of the kind of personal help they want or need. That may just be to ease things during busy periods with access to additional staff or it might be finding ways that fit in with their career expectations such as job development or a better work-life balance.
It can also include employees who need additional help such as those with a disability.
Wants a Stable Career
Employees who are constantly in fear of losing their jobs or being undermined in the office are likely, of course, to be less engaged than those who feel they have a stable career pathway.
Top talent are usually looking for some way to progress their future employment prospects and have high expectations of a stable career pathway that meets their needs and those of the organisation they work for.
How Harrison Assessments Talent Solution helps
Managers can measure employee expectations, the intrinsic behaviours that drive individual and group engagement, by analysing the 8 key areas. This helps to understand any differences between an employee as well as looking at the overall group or team’s expectations. These insights facilitate the essential dialogue between employee and manager, fostering a shared responsibility for engagement to build a culture of employee engagement.
Managers can use the Manage, Develop and Retain report as a guide to getting the best performance out of an individual member of their team, and shows how mis-matched communication and management styles could potentially demotivate a talented employee. Instead the report suggests how best to develop and engage the employee, what type of tasks to delegate and behaviours to watch out for that could impede performance.
Assess employee engagement factors for individuals and groups with summary dashboards and detailed reports.
Employee Engagement White Paper
This employee engagement white paper will outline why this is the case and what is needed to achieve a greater impact on organisational performance.
It includes some key areas relating to engagement in the workplace and a crucial 3-step guide to assist with the application of engagement analytics.
Written by Dan Harrison, Ph.D. – Organisational Psychology, developer and CEO of Harrison Assessments, this white paper is a must read for anyone involved in employee engagement. Request your copy here –
How Employee Engagement Analytics Help Create a Culture of Engagement
Employee engagement is a hot topic—and for good reason. Research studies from Gallup®, BlessingWhite®, and many more continue to demonstrate that employee engagement highly impacts key organisational metrics including talent retention, mission achievement, growth, and profitability.
Engagement surveys are commonly used to assess the organisation’s level of employee engagement. While this approach has proven valuable in many organisations, it has limitations in terms of improving individual engagement and creating a culture of engagement.
This employee engagement white paper will outline why this is the case and what is needed to achieve a greater impact on organisational performance metrics.
It includes some key areas relating to engagement in the workplace and a crucial 3-step guide to assist you with the application of engagement analytics.
Written by Dan Harrison, Ph.D. – Organisational Psychology, developer and CEO of Harrison Assessments, this white paper is a must read for anyone involved in employee engagement. Request your copy here –
Organisations seek to to attract and retain the best talent for specific roles and more importantly – the right cultural fit.
Even organisations that outsource their selection processes have told us that although outsourcing solves the initial sorting process it often does nothing for the ‘cultural fit’ of applicant to organisation. In fact, the CIPD recently published statistics showing that only 8% of organisations are actually happy with their talent management approach. In our experience there are a number of reasons for this – disparate methods being used at differing levels and in different areas of the organisation and the perception of cost and dissatisfaction with assessment tools are among the most common.
So how do you measure company values?
It has become common practice for business trainers/facilitators to help organisations identify their values and connect these to the behaviours expected in support of these values. Harrison Assessments helps to identify the behaviours behind the values in a way that hasn’t been easy before.
How do companies measure employee performance against their values?
The concept is simple. If something is important to us as human beings we will behave in a way that supports this value. So behind each value must be a set of behavioural competencies and behind each competency is a set of behavioural traits.
Case Study: The entrepreneurial warehouse managers
We were recently working with an organisation who have a strong value around entrepreneurship. They wanted all their warehouse managers to behave in an entrepreneurial way as if the business was their own. Of course this can mean different things to different people and it took time to establish what was really required in terms of behaviour. For example true entrepreneurs can be very high risk takers unable to convey their vision to others. This is certainly not what the organisation was looking for. When we broke it down we discovered that what was actually required was –
Essential traits – optimism, persistence, self-acceptance, self- improvement, the ability to take initiative, enthusiasm for the role, the ability to be open and reflective and some warmth and empathy.
Desirable traits – collaboration, effective enforcing, a desire to lead, a systematic approach, the ability to work as a team, diplomacy, frankness, the ability to enlist co-operation, the ability to handle conflict, flexibility, helpfulness and tolerance of structure
Traits to avoid – rebellious autonomy, harshness, insensitivity, evasiveness, imprecision caused through speed, scepticism, permissiveness and slow precision.
Taking a closer look at these you may say that some entrepreneurs will fit into this profile but others definitely not. So gaining a clearer picture was essential to fully understand what the organisation was looking for.
All the other company values were analysed in the same way to produce an overall profile against which the company can measure accurately.
So now the company has an accurate measuring tool as well as a clearer understanding of their own expectations in relation to their advertised values. This not only represents a huge cost saving in making sure they recruit people who will fit the culture, it highlights automatically areas for development for existing employees and forms the basis for personal development plans. A next possible step is to incorporate this measurement into the appraisal system thus making it easier for managers to have conversations which may previously have been avoided.
