Employee Recognition: Giving Praise Is NOT Optional

Giving Praise for a Great Job Well Done

Many employers believe it’s unnecessary to reward employees for a job they are getting paid to do, but what employers need to understand is that materialistic reward systems are not at all the same as recognizing employees …

 

This is exactly what I talk about in my speaker program on You’re The Person I WANT To Keep: Employee Motivation and Engagement. You must praise people when they do an exceptional job – when they knock the ball out of the ballpark. Yet, praise – recognition for doing an exception job above and beyond the call of duty – is frequently not mentioned, paraded in front of peers, or given an appropriate round of applause.

And that’s a complete turn-off to your best performers. They’ll start leaving over time when required praise is not given.

When was the last time you gave your employees praise for an exceptional job well done?

Do you keep a list of every major accomplishment for the entire organization day by day – whether the accomplishment was by a team or an individual? If you don’t know who is making great impact in your organization, how can you praise? If you don’t praise, how can you expect your employees to be satisfied, motivated, turned on, and engaged?

Starting tomorrow, begin making a list everytime someone in your organization EXCEEDS expectations (I guess this means you need to start defining expectations). Within minutes of hearing of this extraordinary achievement, some executive should be patting that individual on the back and giving sincere and heart-felt praise. This tiny, almost trivial activity will generate a cultural revolution within your organization. Try it for a few months and see if it doesn’t dramatically improve employee satisfaction, performance, and engagement.

Barry Deutsch

Read the full article on www.presentaplaque.com for the details for giving praise as a key component of a non-monetary reward and recognition system.

Can You Handle Being on Stage as a Leader?

Great Leadership Blog

Beth Armknecht Miller is a Vistage Chair in Atlanta who provides a great role model of leveraging social media to create a personal brand around being a Vistage Chair. She does a great job using social media tools to amplify her message as a Vistage Chair in her community. One of the blogs I follow is the Great Leadership Blog by Dan McCarthy. I stumbled across this guest blog post by Beth on that blog titled “Don’t Let the Pebbles Cover the Rocks“.

Beth talked about the importance of not letting the urgent overwhelm the important in this article. If you’ll remember the writings of Steven Covey in the Seven Habits of Effective People, this was one of the key downfalls of most individuals – they let the urgent dictate their lives.

My focus was on a particularly interesting comment Beth made in her blog article that stuck in my mind. Many of you know that I coach High School Girls Basketball. We just finished our league season. The comment Beth made me reflect back over the last 6 months on my personal leadership, my ability to “control” my emotions and the other coaches I’ve observed in 100s of high school basketball games since the beginning of September. We have 3 levels in our program and each level has played over 50 games each. I announce all of our boys games for home games at our High School. Plus I run a youth club team with over 100 kids. That’s observing a lot of games. Here’s the comment Beth made about leadership:

And finally, having the skill to manage your emotions in times of the urgent is critical to leadership success. Many leaders forget that they are “on stage”. Their employees are always looking to them for emotional and behavioral cues. So when something or someone becomes that pebble, you need to kick up your level of emotional intelligence. Step back and think before you react.

 

I realized that the girls who played for me looked to me for guidance, inspiration, and focus. The lessons I’ve learned from coaching have helped me in my personal business, executive search practice, and in coaching my clients to be more effective in retaining top talent.

Observations:

Very few basketball coaches have good control of their emotions and are able to effectively communicate with their teams. Their style is measured in extremes – from pure joy to outright anger. They talk about being ethical and value-based in their style out one side of their mouth, and out the other side swear at their players, abuse the referees, and trash talk the opponents. I have to ask myself what type of contradiction that sets up in the minds of young student-athletes. Perhaps, it prepares them for a lifetime of abusive and terrible bosses. Is there a significant difference in this aberrant behavior by coaches of high school girls vs. CEOs at entrepreneurial companies.

I may sometimes wonder if the girls on my team are paying any attention to what I am saying or doing during practices or games. I then realize they are focused on me with laser attention – every action, word, verbal or non-verbal comment is absorbed, analyzed, digested, and filed away for future use. I create a very open team environment where my girls can feel free to say anything they want without the feeling of retribution for being open. I am reminded of being on stage for them when I hear things like:

Why is that other coach yelling at his team?

Coach Barry – don’t forget to breath

Can you believe what that coach just said to the referee? How about that parent behind us who just yelled that comment – isn’t that inappropriate?

Coach Barry – when you sit down on the bench we feel you’ve given up on us.

My coaching peers frequently ask me why I don’t yell at the referees when I am upset about their calls. I tell them that the referees are doing their best job and sometimes they make mistakes under difficult situations and pressure. I ask them how they would feel if I yelled at them every time they made a mistake.

Top talent will not put up with a boss who cannot control their emotions. Members of a sports team will stop working hard when they don’t trust or believe in their coach. Employees are no different. If you’re going to be a “nut-case” and not coach/manage from a values-based approach all the time, then you should just forget about ever retaining top talent.

One of the top 3 reasons top talent decides to leave is that they lose their trust in you as THEIR leader. Not being able to control your emotions and not being able to “walk the talk” of your values is one of the fastest methods to lose good people. How many of your managers and executives have no clue how to manage with values and control their emotional state? Are they capable of learning? Should you send them to charm school? OR is it time to move on and hire better managers. You managerial and supervisors will dictate the caliber of team that delivers the front line of your service. If you’ve got “BAD” managers in those roles, you’ll never achieve long term continual success since they will only be able to hire and retain average and mediocre candidates who can’t find a job elsewhere.

Have you ever played on a team for a coach who couldn’t control their emotions – have you ever worked in an environment where the CEO or manager couldn’t control their emotions? What did you do about it?

My experience is that the entire culture/style/values of the team, group, department, or organization is set by the coach or leader? Do you have managers in your organization contributing to dysfunction?

If you would like to read the full article, click the link below:

Don’t let the Pebbles Cover the Rocks

 

Barry Deutsch

 

 

 

If you would like to read the full article, click the link below:

Don’t Let the Pebbles Cover the Rocks

Barry Deutsch

Do Sales Managers Realize They Are Making These Mistakes?

 

Why does Benjamin Franklin’s quote about the definition of insanity seem so appropriate for many managers – especially sales managers?

In an interesting article on the Sales Archaeologist Blog, Frank Belzer laid out his Top Ten Mistakes that he sees Sales Managers making over and over again. I’ve listed a few items from the Top Ten List below. As you look at this list – has the sales manager or executive in your organization making these same mistakes year after year?

In our executive search practice for sales leadership, we’ve noted that most replacement searches are not due to lack of competency, intellect, knowledge, or past experience. Frequently, it’s the inability to execute around basic and fundamental elements of best practices in sales management. There is no magic formula or pixie dust that separates top performing sales managers from weak sales managers.

The difference between the two groups in terms of results and outcomes is dramatic. The number one element that separates these two groups – top talent vs. weak performers – is in the execution of sales management best practices, which are nothing more than common-sense approaches to good management. As you may recall, measuring the ability to achieve flawless execution is one of the 5 Core Interview Questions in our Success Factor Methodology. Many companies make mistakes in hiring by not probing and validating at a deep level the ability to execute.

Here is the Top 3 on the Top Ten List published on the Sales Archaeologist Blog:

 

  1. Your sales people learn to be consultative with your clients by your example being consultative with them. Everyone wants their sales people to be consultative but so often managers operate through ultimatums, quick commands or terse comments – not consultative.
  2. Your sales people learn how to listen because you listen to them.
  3. Your sales people learn how to make your prospects feel comfortable with change because you demonstrate how it is done when changes need to be made on the team.

If you would like to see the rest of the list, click the link below. Are you up for measuring your sales manager against this list?

The Top Ten Mistakes Sales Managers Don’t Even Know They Are Making

Barry Deutsch

Employee Engagement – A Few Resources

Let’s continue down this path of Employee Engagement. Here are a few additional articles you might want to read regarding employee engagement:

We talk extensively about Employee Engagement in our Vistage Group Presentation “You’re the Person I Want To Keep”. Our experience over the last decade is that very few companies actively implement programs, activities, and process to embed employee engagement into the fabric of their organizations.

If you don’t start doing it NOW – what’s the risk as the economy starts to improve and more employees start to look to see if the “grass is greener” somewhere else?

Barry

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Employee Engagement – Inside the Mind of a CEO

David Zinger is another of my favorite bloggers with great insight to improving employee engagement, culture, satisfaction, and commitment. He writes a Blog titled “David Zinger Employee Engagement“. In a recent blog posting, David writes about Adam Bryant’s weekly column in the Sunday New York Times called “Corner Office”.

Adam interviews various CEOs and Presidents in his weekly column on topics of leadership. In one of these columns, he interviewe arbara J. Krusiek, CEO of the Calvert Group on Career Ladder? It’s Time for a New Metaphor.

I would highly recommend reading the blog posting or the original article in the Corner Office Column.

There are a few great nuggets to take back and think about implementing within your company to improve employee engagement, excitement, passion, satisfaction – not to mention retention.

Barry

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What’s your version of HR Insanity?

Dilbert animation cell
Image via Wikipedia

Evil HR Lady is one of my favorite blogs to follow. Suzanne Lucas, the funny and sometimes frank HR Guru behind Evil HR Lady, recently wrote on her blog asking for samples of Your Favorite or Least Favorite Policy.

I almost doubled over in laughter reading some of these Dilbert-ish comments.

What are the tribal policies that are in place in your company or organization that make you want to go home and either laugh till you cry, or cry while pounding on the wall? Where do these come from?

How many of your employees are turned off to your culture when they hear, read, see policies that have no grounding in common sense.

Why do you put policies in place that cause your employees to question your sanity?

File this one under “How I Encourage My Best People to Leave and Join My Competitors”.

Barry Deutsch

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