The Pros And Cons Of Rewarding Your Employees
How are you with rewarding your people?
The occasional box of chocolates. Maybe an away day ‘Team-Building’, dressed up as learning, with a few (or a lot of) beers at the free bar!
Sometimes you’ll recognise just one person for a particular effort. Other times all of your people need recognition for a team result, where a big goal has been achieved overall.
Recognition by reward is, frankly, fraught with difficulties!
Indeed in teams where your management style is seen to be consistent and fair to all, you will be doing pretty well and above the average, just doing that and very, very motivational it will be!
Tangible reward is another ball-game. You can do it if you are fair and consistent, as a basic requirement, and also listen hard for clues to enable you to be inclusive for all your people. Reward for great performance on an individual basis needs to be fact-based above all.
Then everyone needs to be in a position to be able to achieve whatever greatness it is that you reward for.
From the folks who keeps the toilets clean, to the front-end star salespeople – whose achievements are much more easily related to the business end. Making sure everyone can be recognised; can be a ‘winner’ is vital.
Then, recognising everyone on a rota basis is tough as well!
If you are seen to be doing this, then sceptics will spot that their turn will come whatever and the value of the reward is DEvalued.
See the tricky bits in this?
The key is to keep it fun and light. Rewarding the whole team with simple and fun things like cream cakes or chocolate as a start can worth really, really well.
As a manager, be especially sensitive to things you hear where someone has done well and reward them accordingly.
Maybe by letting them go early one night or have a shot at a different role they’ve aspired to for a couple of days.
Truth is, reward is best served up by thanks and personal recognition. And tangible treats are fun to do and use as long as they fit in with the environment of the place where people work.
There are two pitfalls for tangible reward:-
1. You only reward your own or your senior team’s ‘favorites’ – and then one half of your team feels badly done to, which undermines overall morale.
2. You overlay material reward on unhappy employees. And they are unhappy because their workplace is not the best environment for them to work (the things that should always happen as a core don’t happen).
Sharing a free cake or two with each of your people, without the basics being right, is never going to be in your best interests.
(c) 2007 Martin Haworth is a Business and Management Coach. He works worldwide with small business owners, managers and corporate leaders. He has hundreds of hints, tips and ideas at his website, http://www.coaching-businesses-to-success.com
Top 10 Strategic Thinking Skills
To be up there with the best strategic thinkers, you need to use the left and right sides of your brain, a skill which takes practice as well as confidence. Having the logic and creative sides to your skillset are of immense value.
Here are some skills that the very best strategic thinkers have, and use, every day.
They Have a Vision
They are great at both thinking with a strategic purpose as well as creating a Visioning process. They have both tools in their kit and they use both to complement each other. This form of supportive thinking and seeing the future, creates a way of thinking and evolving strategy that is focused and yet broad.
Make Time
In a busy businesses and organisations, be they small or large, making the time is vital. At the top of their game key strategic thinkers take time out. Maybe a retreat (maximum points!); maybe a day in a hotel foyer; maybe an afternoon somewhere/anywhere, with a blank sheet and a thinking hat on. Whatever works for them – but they do it.
Are Not Hasty
The clue is in the description, Strategic Thinking is not about today, tomorrow or next week. In close partnership with holding a clear vision for the business future, these two create the tomorrows of the future. But not tomorrow! This is shaping, coaxing, tuning for a quality business performance in the years to come. Great exponents take time to fine tune, revise and engineer quality futures!
Absorb and Notice
They are truly aware. In any business, there are clues, often subtle, both internal and external, to help guide future direction and realize opportunities. Great Strategic Thinkers take all of this in, so that as they set aside time to think, they have a full deck of information to guide them. Sometimes, it’s an ‘aha’ moment on vacation, when they observe something that resonates; it might be on a morning walk out in the country; it might be what someone says as they serve them coffee. Making links, however tenuous, is what makes this work so well.
Review Often
The best Strategic Thinkers check that their thinking has been validated. Is it going to work, against a world of regular, consistent and yet sometimes volatile change? This activity is a moving target, so to build a better understanding, snapshots; benchmarks and regular stocktaking are all very useful to confirm the quality of the thinking – and absorbed into the skillset for their and their organizations future.
Learn from Experience
Over time, these folk use their experiences, small and large, to think better on strategic issues. This makes their use of this time really efficient and particularly effective. There are learned short-cuts to the perhaps more formalized strategic planning process and experience is a huge, valuable added bonus.
Use a Team
By utilising more than just their own brain (though this is vital for some of the process!), those great at Strategic Thinking bounce ideas off others in the workplace and encourage their input above and beyond their delivery of the day job. The old adage that 1+1=3 in the input of thinking is hugely valid. And 5 people make a much more significant contribution than 2 – and so on!
Realism Rules (A Little!)
Although they create ideas very openly, key strategic thinkers have a sense of realism and honesty about what is achievable in the longer term. This is not to hold them back; more it is to deliver success. They underpromise and overdeliver, whilst also ensuring that the day to day business of the organization – the ‘now’ – is served adequately too. That’s what gets the business paid today, whilst building the future of tomorrow.
Have Clear Milestones
By creating checks in their thinking, to review progress, they have the opportunity to tweak. They have an innate ability to spot the twists and turns necessary. A 5,000 mile journey by a jet plane reaches the destination only by regular and consistent course checks and adjustments.
Are Non-Judgemental
Because the route to a successful future is not bounded by judging their, or others, thinking as they get creative – that is for elsewhere – better ideas flow. Open minds are encouraged and the detail tested later. Open minded thinking needs real checks and balances – but AFTER the openness has stimulated the breadth of imaginative ideas only such freedom can provide.
In the most successful organizations over the years and decades, where the test of time has shown them the excellent businesses they are, the Sony’s, Coca Colas, Nokias and Toyotas of this world think ahead and encourage great Strategic Thinking at least somewhere in their busness plans.
In a cut-throat today world of this year’s bonus and dividend, big business has a tendency to look short-term and manage that efficiently and well. A sustainable future needs more, whatever size your business is.
(c) 2007 Martin Haworth is a Business and Management Coach. He works worldwide, mainly by phone, with small business owners, managers and corporate leaders. He has hundreds of hints, tips and ideas at his website, http://www.coaching-businesses-to-success.com
7 Creative Problem Solving Techniques
Have you ever encountered a problem only to become stumped trying to come up with a solution? How often have you found yourself saying that there is just no possible answer and you think that you have reached a dead end?
From time to time the problems that we are faced with may be so huge that one may feel like they are hammering against a brick wall. The stress involved with having to solve such a problem can be more than just a little overwhelming.
But have faith and rejoice, for there may be hope yet!
With a more optimistic mindset, a person will find that they are more creative when solving their problems. This article identifies seven creative problem-solving techniques.
1. Take note of assumptions and constraints with the problem. Oftentimes, these assumptions can obstruct our view of possible solutions. Note which assumptions are not valid and which need to be addressed.
2. You need to take a hard look at what the problem really is. Know the problem and have a concrete understanding of what it is about. By knowing what the problem is and how it works, you may find that you will have built a better foundation towards solving the problem.
Identify all the participating entities and then decide what their relationship is to one another. Take note of all the things you stand to gain or loss due to the current problem. Once you have considered the following you should have a clear and simple statement of what the problem is.
3. Try solving the problem in parts. For example, going from the more general views to the more detailed parts of the problem may solve it. This method is called the top down approach. First, write down a question and then come up with a general one-sentence solution, now you will be able to develop the solution even further.
4. It is important to keep a creative and analytical voice of reason at the back of your head. If someone else suggests a solution, be creative, think of how to make the solution work. Also think realistically and look for any possible weak links in the suggested solution.
5. Remain open-minded to the fact that there may be more than one solution to the problem. Keep track of them and go with the one that best fits your situation.
6. You know the old saying, “two heads are better than one.” It is so very true, so remember to be open to new ideas. There may be answers for problems that you thought were unsolvable. You will benefit from listening to others, especially when the information is coming from someone who has had experience with a similar problem to yours.
7. Be patient. There is always the chance that the solution will present itself. Remember, no one is able to come up with the right invention the first time around.
So the next time that a problem arises and you think that you are unable to solve it, think again. The solution could be staring you in the face. It just takes some planning, time and a little creative thinking.
Kevin Sinclair is the publisher and editor of Be Successful News, a site that provides information and articles on how to succeed in your own home or small business. http://www.besuccessfulnews.com/
Leading Into the Future
The subject of leadership goes to the root of organized human behavior. Leadership is so integral to who we are that it’s difficult to imagine human history without it. Would great cities have ever been built without it? Would nations have been forged? Indeed, could any great endeavor have been accomplished without leadership? Very likely, no.
It is little wonder, then, that leadership continues to be a very high priority in modern organizations and promises to remain one into the foreseeable future. The Human Resource Institute’s 2003-2004 Major Issues Survey found, for example, that among North American companies ranking 120 different issues, leadership was viewed as the single most important one in terms of its impact on workforce management. Among European companies, it was ranked third.
This isn’t a new development. Since 1988, when HRI began conducting its major issues surveys of many of the top companies in the world, leadership has been ranked among the top five issues. Since 1997, leadership has always taken the top spot. In the most recent survey, fully 76% of North American respondents said it was extremely important; the highest percentage in the history of these surveys (Human Resource Institute, 2004a).
Equally important, leadership is expected to remain a top issue in the future. When asked to predict the importance of various issues ten years into the future, North Americans and Europeans again rated leadership first and third, respectively. But leaders don’t spring into the world fully formed. They need to be trained and developed, whatever their natural talents. This isn’t lost on today’s organizations. Training magazine’s 2005 survey of senior training professionals included leadership and management development as the top training priorities for 2005 (Hall, 2005).
Another survey, this one conducted by Right Management Consultants for the 2004 World Business Forum (Marcus, 2004), found that 65% of surveyed firms placed leadership development as one of the top five focal points for corporate strategy. This response was 20% higher than responses to a similar study conducted just eight years prior. In this report, we take an in-depth look at the subject of leadership, the roles leaders are playing in today’s organizations, and how the best-in-class organizations develop them. We also look into the future to see how leadership may change over the next decade or so.
The following page is a quick review of some of our findings:
- Organizational leadership, which has always been a challenging task, has become even more stressful and difficult in recent years.
- Leadership has grown in importance due to the fast pace of change in combination with increased global competition and a growing focus on the customer.
- Today’s leaders are expected to be excellent strategists and communicators.
- Business ethics will become more not less important to leadership over the next ten years.
- If they don’t perform well, top leaders of major companies can expect to lose their jobs more quickly than ever before.
- Even while making sure their companies performs well, leaders are expected to develop other leaders.
- Technology and new organizational structures are changing the ways leaders do their jobs.
- Leaders must increasingly balance managerial control with the need to spark innovation in their organizations.
- The top barrier to leadership development is a lack of behavior measures, followed by inadequate content in development programs.
- When it comes to leadership, most companies know what’s important but don’t always act on this knowledge.
- Best-in-class companies are committed and unremitting in their pursuit of leadership excellence.
With over 40 years experience; Canadian Management Centre has earned the reputation as a trusted partner in worldwide professional development and leadership training that improves the immediate performance and long-term results. http://www.cmctraining.org/leadership.asp
How To Motivate And Inspire Your Employees To Be The Best They Can Be
It would be misleading to make managers and supervisors think that there’s a secret to motivating and inspiring their fellow employees. In fact, only the employees themselves can do that, and so the role of the management is to create and foster an environment in which employees are given the opportunity to seek personal motivation and inspiration in their jobs and careers.
This might sound harder than it seems, but the truth is that everyone knows how to create such an environment. If you asked yourself what would make you happy (at the workplace), most people would come up with things such as job satisfaction, good working environment (i.e. people you work with and the resources provided to facilitate this), good employers, and the list goes on and on. One thing that underpins all of these elements is the extent to which an employee’s skills are utilized in their position within the organization.
One reason retailers hesitate to hire over-qualified staff is that they often become bored or dissatisfied with their work, once they’ve mastered and fine tuned the key elements required to perform the ascribed task efficiently. In other words, they have skills that are not being used, and therefore their talents are not applied to the extent that they find ideal for their qualifications. An employer needs to make sure that the skills and talents of their employees are being applied to their full potential, because that is the only way that employees will find work satisfying and challenging at the same time. How do employers do this?
Everyone has their dreams and goals, and each one of these dreams and goals are uniquely different. What employers need to understand is that putting people together means finding ways for people to help each other achieve and navigate their way towards those goals, rather than the employer forcing the company’s ideals and goal onto the employees of the organization. Therefore, give the employees what they want and need from their jobs, and they’ll give you what the organization wants and need from them. Only by the two different parties (i.e. the employer and the employee) working towards their own goals can conflicts be avoided.
Remember, the employee is not being paid for a company to do a job, they are accepting an offer from the company to supply them with their expertise and skills. The working relationship between a employer and employee should be one of mutual respect, understanding, and the aim to help each other realize their own dreams and goals.
The author would like you to visit http://www.employeeuniversity.com/ and http://employeeuniversity.com/employee_motivation/motivational/motivational_videos.htm.