Author Archives: David Burkus

About David Burkus

Dr. David Burkus is an organizational psychologist and best-selling author. Recognized as one of the world’s leading business thinkers, his forward-thinking ideas and books are helping leaders and teams do their best work ever. David is the author of five books about business and leadership and he's been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, CNN, the BBC, NPR, and more. A former business school professor turned sought-after international speaker, he’s worked with organizations of all sizes and across all industries.

Team Conflict Isn’t Always Bad

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Team Conflict Isn't Always Bad

GUEST POST from David Burkus

Conflict on teams is inevitable. But here’s the real question: does it need to be resolved? Not always. In fact, the type of conflict matters just as much as how you address it. Some conflicts demand immediate resolution, while others can be channeled into creativity and progress. Knowing the difference is critical to leading a team effectively.

At its core, conflict on teams falls into two categories: personal conflict and task-focused conflict. Personal conflict is what most of us think of first—tensions that get personal, unkind remarks, or behaviors that erode respect. Left unaddressed, this type of conflict undermines trust and productivity. Task-focused conflict, however, is entirely different. This is the natural tension that arises from diverse ideas and perspectives. It’s not a problem to be solved; it’s a tool to be harnessed. Handled well, task-focused conflict can propel a team forward.

Let’s look at both in depth—how to resolve personal conflict and how to channel task-focused conflict into better outcomes for the team.

Resolving Personal Conflict

When personal conflict on teams arises, it can feel uncomfortable, even awkward, to step in as a leader. Yet the cost of avoiding it is far greater. Toxic behavior, left unchecked, damages the entire team. Addressing it quickly and thoughtfully is key to maintaining a healthy team dynamic.

The best approach often begins with a private, one-on-one conversation. For less overt issues—like someone cutting a teammate off during a meeting or taking a criticism too far—pulling the individual aside after the fact is often more effective than addressing it publicly. Explain what you observed, how it impacts the team, and what needs to change. Your goal isn’t to embarrass them but to guide them toward more constructive behavior.

When the conflict on teams involves repeated tensions between two people, start with separate conversations. This allows you to understand each person’s perspective and identify the root of the issue. Once you’ve done that, consider bringing them together for a mediated discussion. The goal isn’t to force them to like each other but to secure a commitment to respect and professional behavior. Over time, if people consistently act respectfully, they often grow to genuinely respect one another — a win for everyone involved.

Whatever the situation, don’t wait to act. Personal conflict that lingers becomes a poison to the team. Address it early, directly, and consistently. Your willingness to confront these issues sends a powerful message about what kind of culture your team will have — a culture of respect and accountability.

Harnessing Task-Focused Conflict on Teams

Task-focused conflict, by contrast, is not something to resolve. It’s something to embrace. Teams are made up of individuals with different experiences, perspectives, and ideas. That’s their strength. When these differences lead to debates over the best course of action, your role as a leader isn’t to shut it down. It’s to create the conditions where productive conflict can thrive.

The first step is to foster an environment where everyone feels safe sharing their ideas. Too often, leaders assume they’ve created space for feedback simply by asking, “What does everyone think?” at the end of a meeting. But vague invitations rarely lead to meaningful input. Instead, make feedback an active part of your team’s discussions. One approach is to explicitly ask for “builds” and “flags.” Builds are suggestions that add to or improve an idea. Flags are concerns or alternative approaches. This framework encourages participation and ensures that all voices are heard.

Equally important is creating psychological safety—the sense that team members can share dissenting ideas without fear of judgment or retaliation. This starts with you as a leader. When you express doubt, admit uncertainty, or genuinely invite feedback, you show vulnerability. That vulnerability signals trust, which is the foundation of psychological safety. But it’s not enough to invite ideas; you must also respond to them with respect. Engage fully, listen actively, and ensure that team members feel heard. A team that trusts its leader and each other will embrace conflict as a pathway to better solutions.

When it comes time to respond to conflicting ideas, focus on the assumptions behind them rather than the ideas themselves. People often tie their identities to their ideas, which can make critique feel personal. But assumptions are different. They can be questioned without sparking defensiveness. For example, if a debate arises about project timelines, you might uncover that one person assumes it will take six months while another assumes a year. By exploring these assumptions, the team can arrive at a clearer understanding—and a better decision.

When the Team Can’t Agree

Despite your best efforts, there will be times when the team can’t reach consensus. This is where your leadership is most crucial. After everyone has had the opportunity to share their perspective, it’s time to decide and move forward. This is the principle of “disagree and commit.”

Make it clear that every voice matters and that the decision-making process is the team’s opportunity to influence the outcome. But once a decision is made—whether by consensus or by you as the leader—it’s time for everyone to align and commit. The team must understand that revisiting the debate later is not an option. This clarity ensures that even unresolved disagreements don’t derail progress.

Turning Conflict Into a Strength

Conflict on teams isn’t inherently bad. In fact, task-focused conflict is one of the best tools a team has for finding innovative solutions. The challenge is in how you, as a leader, handle it. Personal conflict needs resolution, quickly and thoughtfully. Task-focused conflict needs space to flourish, guided by a culture of respect and psychological safety.

When managed well, conflict on teams transforms from a source of tension into a driver of success. It pushes teams to consider new perspectives, challenge assumptions, and arrive at better outcomes. As a leader, your job isn’t to eliminate conflict. It’s to create an environment where it can be constructive, where it can make your team stronger.

Conflict on teams isn’t something to fear. It’s something to embrace. And when you do, you’ll find that the best ideas—and the best teams—are forged through it.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Is There a Real Difference Between Leaders and Managers?

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Is There a Real Difference Between Leaders and Managers?

GUEST POST from David Burkus

The debate between leaders vs managers has been a long-standing conversation in professional circles. Some elevate the role of leaders, casting them as visionaries who inspire, while relegating managers to the shadows of administrative drudgery. But does this distinction really matter? More importantly, how can a manager evolve into a true leader? Let’s explore the heart of this conversation and break down why separating leadership from management can sometimes lead to dangerous misconceptions.

Why the Debate Between Leaders vs Managers Matters Less Than You Think

Much of the debate over leaders vs managers hinges on over-idealization. Leaders are often depicted as charismatic figures, visionaries who drive change and inspire their teams. Managers, by contrast, are often painted as the ones who carry out routine, less glamorous tasks. However, this binary thinking is a gross oversimplification. When we separate leaders vs managers too starkly, we set both roles up for failure.

In reality, great leaders need managerial skills to succeed. Likewise, strong managers must cultivate leadership qualities if they aim to have a meaningful impact. Consider recent examples: Adam Neumann of WeWork or Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos—visionaries without the grounding managerial skills to make their ambitious plans a reality. Even Steve Jobs, who is lionized as a leader, struggled as a manager and needed skilled managerial partners like Tim Cook to bring his vision to life. This demonstrates the inherent interdependence of the leader vs manager roles.

Management as a Foundation for Leadership

To understand why leadership is inseparable from management, let’s break down what being a manager entails. In the leader vs manager conversation, management often gets short-changed as “administrative,” but it encompasses setting objectives, removing obstacles, allocating resources, delegating tasks, and ensuring accountability. These tasks are not merely about managing people; they are about creating results and making progress happen.

In contrast, leaders serve to inspire, unify, and mobilize teams around a shared mission. They cast a vision of what can be, rallying people to pursue a goal together. But what use is vision if there is no plan for how to achieve it? This is why the idea of leaders vs managers being wholly distinct from one another can be damaging; leadership without a managerial foundation is fragile.

The Leader vs Manager Hybrid in Action

Successful professionals embody the blend of both roles in the leaders vs managers debate. Consider Steve Jobs again: his visionary prowess would not have led to Apple’s success without the operational grounding provided by Tim Cook. The true distinction between effective leaders and ineffective ones often boils down to their ability to marry visionary leadership with operational execution, revealing that the line separating leaders vs managers is not as clear as it might seem.

Great leaders do not abandon their managerial roots. Even CEOs, often perceived as paragons of leadership, must manage resources, oversee strategy, and allocate people effectively. Leadership might soar at 30,000 feet, but it always requires an anchor on the ground—a reminder that even the most inspiring figures must master the duality inherent in the leader vs manager dynamic.

Evolving From Manager to Leader

For those starting out in management, the path from manager to leader is not instantaneous. When you are first assigned a managerial role, your primary tasks center around administrative competence: running effective meetings, managing budgets, and ensuring project deadlines are met. This foundational period is essential for anyone navigating the leader vs manager journey. Only by mastering these skills can you then focus on expanding your influence, building relationships, and inspiring others.

True leadership emerges gradually. It begins with influence over your team and, as you grow, expands to influence your broader organization. The journey from manager to leader involves understanding the company’s strategic direction, aligning your team’s objectives with broader organizational goals, and participating in or leading conversations about that strategy. For those grappling with the leaders vs managers dichotomy, take note: growth happens through learning and doing, not simply by aspiring.

The Practical Blend of Leaders vs Managers

Ultimately, the debate between leaders vs managers is less important than understanding their interconnectedness. Every organization needs individuals who can inspire and guide while also ensuring operational discipline. Leaders who lose sight of practicalities can steer organizations into chaos. Managers who refuse to inspire can stifle innovation and morale. The true magic lies in combining these strengths: casting a compelling vision and navigating the gritty realities that make it possible.

By blending strong leadership qualities with grounded managerial skills, you become the kind of leader who doesn’t just talk about vision but delivers results. In the end, the best leaders are those who understand their dual responsibility in the leader vs manager equation—and execute both roles masterfully.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Why Putting Employees First and Customers Second Works

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Why Putting Employees First and Customers Second Works

GUEST POST from David Burkus

What if your company announced that, moving forward, it would be place customers second on its list of priorities?

Sounds crazy. The customer is always right. Surely the customer is always first as well.

But that’s exactly what Vineet Nayar, CEO of HCL Technologies did over a decade ago. He announced that the company’s senior leaders would be placing the needs of employees first, and customers second. And the results have been spectacular.

How The Employees First Strategy Started

In 2006, Vineet Nayar, CEO of HCL, a digital engineering company based in India, boldly told his clients they were no longer the company’s top priority. Instead, the focus would be put on employees first. His belief was simple: happy employees make happy customers. Nayar labeled employees who actually interacted with customers as the “value zone,” where the real business magic happens — and any employee in the value zone received the dedicated focus of managers and support functions.

To bring this to life, he flipped the traditional management structure. He made the organizational chart look like an upside-down pyramid. Turning the hierarchy upside down required making managers accountable to front-line employees and ensuring that those in the support functions actually supported those front-line employees, instead of just insisting that they follow the hierarchy’s rigid systems.

Nayar focused his attention on two areas to ensure that the management and support functions served the front-line: reversing accountability and building transparency. Specifically, 360-degree feedback evaluations were expanded to include more front-line workers’ feedback for managers and senior level executives (that’s the accountability), and crucially those evaluations were made public so everyone who contributed to the survey could see the results (there’s your transparency). In addition, when problems occurred for front-line workers, they could create and own support tickets that their managers would have to address (usually, it’s the other way around in top to bottom organizations).

It’s important to note that HCL Technologies wasn’t a little start up in a garage or even a 50-person company. This was done at a 55,000 person, multinational organization. And, spoiler alert, it’s now grown to over 200,000 employees. Pulling off this flip was no small feat, but the results speak for themselves. Employee satisfaction soared, customer service improved, and revenues nearly tripled. By 2009, HCL was named India’s best employer.

Contrast this story with an example of what can go wrong when employee experience is overlooked. In 2001, Robert Nardelli was the newly minted CEO of Home Depot. Expectations were high given his track record at his old job at General Electric, where he had led several successful manufacturing operations.

At Home Depot, Nardelli noticed the stores were staffed with knowledgeable, full-time employees, and in his opinion, a bit too many. What do new leaders, wrongfully, do when they want to make waves and save money?

Yep, he downsized to optimize costs.

He decided to hire more part-timers, many of whom had less expertise in home improvement. The results were not what he expected. Customers quickly noticed the absence of their favorite employees and the decline in service quality. It turned out that managing a service organization like Home Depot was very different from managing a manufacturing operation.

This story underscores a critical point: leading a service organization requires a different approach — one that prioritizes employee engagement and expertise.

“Employees first, customers second” is still about serving the customer, but it’s about serving the customer through the employees whose job it is to serve the customer. Weird how that works, isn’t it? Understand that helping your employees helps your customers. These two parties are intrinsically tied together.

Research On Employees First

Nayar’s success story isn’t an isolated incidence of dumb luck. There’s research behind this. Researchers at Harvard University found a link between employee satisfaction and profitability. They took aim at a long-standing assumption in the business world that market share is the primary driver of profitability. If a company can increase market share, the thinking went, it will increase sales while taking advantage of economies of scale to lower costs and thus increase profits.

However, when they examined a variety of companies and the existing research, they found that market share is one factor in profitability. But that another factor better explains the most profitable companies: customer loyalty.

Based on their research, they estimated that a mere 5 percent increase in customer loyalty can yield a 25 to 85 percent increase in profitability.

Here’s how it works in practice: Profits are driven by customer loyalty. Customer loyalty is driven by employee satisfaction. And employee satisfaction is driven by putting employees first. They called this The Service-Profit Chain and managers who understand this can create a thriving cycle where employee and customer satisfaction drive each other, ultimately leading to greater business success.

In simple terms, if your business provides a service that your employees have front-line participation in, they are in essence an embodiment of the company, not you or the CEO. The entire brand, the experience, the service rests on those front-line employees. If they aren’t taken care of — if they aren’t satisfied — the customer tends to notice.

How Employees First Creates Customer Loyalty

Employee loyalty is a deep indicator of future performance for service organizations. It’s worth noting that there is a subtle difference between employee satisfaction and employee loyalty. Satisfaction derives from how happy employees are in their role. Loyalty comes from having a real stake in the success of the business. Without loyalty, employees leave for better opportunities, then high turnover rates drive up recruitment and training costs, disrupt productivity, and can negatively impact customer experiences. When employees stay longer, companies save on hiring costs, maintain productivity gains, and create a more positive environment for customers.

Simply put, loyal employees lead to loyal customers.

Great service leaders recognize that improving employee retention involves providing opportunities for growth and advancement. This approach keeps talented employees closer to the customer for longer periods, which directly impacts customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Take Whole Foods Market, for example. They have crafted their entire system — from their rigorous selection process to compensation methods — to encourage front-line employees to stay and thrive. Teams at Whole Foods are responsible for setting key metrics, making decisions on how to meet these targets, and even choosing what food items to buy locally. They’re rewarded with bonuses based on team performance, which often includes finding creative ways to boost sales to balance out labor costs. After three years on the job, employees receive stock options, which further incentivizes them to stay.

Additionally, Whole Foods allows employees to vote every three years on various aspects of the benefits package, from community service pay to health insurance provisions. All these factors contribute to Whole Foods’ remarkably low turnover rate of less than 10 percent for full-time employees after the probationary period — far below the industry average.

The results speak for themselves: Whole Foods is regularly rated as one of the best places to work, known for excellent customer service, and boasts some of the highest profits per square foot in the grocery retail industry.

This success is a testament to the power of employee loyalty in driving exceptional service. Great service leadership isn’t just about managing day-to-day operations — it’s about creating an environment where employees feel valued, empowered, and committed. By focusing on employee loyalty, service leaders can build stronger customer relationships and achieve sustainable success.

Employees First For All Leaders

You may not have the power in your organization to completely flip the hierarchy. But there’s still an important lesson for leaders at all levels: Flip the accountability. This can look like bringing in more feedback from front-line employees or just seeing the structure of your team differently. You work for your team. Don’t squeeze your team; foster them to do well.

In addition, give your employees real stakes and invest in them. Prioritize training and growth opportunities for your employees so they know you’re committed to not just their output, but their career. Parties, gift certificates, awards, summer Fridays, bonuses — all of these are great. Do those things. But those are more employee appreciation, not real development. Development looks like sending your rising stars to conferences, workshops, night school even, if you have the budget. Things you think will help them grow as employees, spark innovation, and create future leaders.

Conclusion

If I could put a message on a billboard in front of every Fortune 500 company, it would be this:

People don’t work for you.

Smart leaders know that employees work with them, and ultimately, leaders work for their people. Embracing the “employees first, customers second” philosophy means prioritizing the well-being and growth of employees, enabling them to deliver outstanding service. Happy, engaged employees create satisfied customers. When leaders invest in their teams’ success and happiness, they cultivate a culture where customers feel valued, leading to long-term loyalty and a thriving business.

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Image credit: David Burkus

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7 Things Leaders Need to Know About Team AI Usage

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7 Things Leaders Need to Know About Team AI Usage

GUEST POST from David Burkus

Leaders, we need to talk about intelligence.

By now you’ve–hopefully–started to take it as seriously as many leaders of industry have been. Either way you look at artificial intelligence, good or bad, it is here to stay. And so we need to start thinking of answers for several questions at the intersection of leadership and AI.

How can it be used effectively, not just to cut costs but to supercharge productivity? How can we use artificial intelligence to supplement our solid foundational leadership? Where should we NOT be using artificial intelligence?

It’s still early in the new world of artificial intelligence in the workplace. A lot of companies are delaying hiring, some are already cutting teams to embrace the optimistic promises AI will bring. But I don’t think we should be all in…yet.

I do know one thing to be true: Leaders using AI will quickly outpace leaders who don’t. And it’s important you get equipped, and in the right way.

Artificial intelligence will make good managers better, but not mediocre bosses better

They say a great actor can bring a C+ movie script up to a B+ or even an A if they are really good. But if a C+ actor is given a C+ script, then it’s going be a C+ movie. The same goes for artificial intelligence and leadership. You need to be a great leader before you start implementing artificial intelligence. AI will not bump up a mediocre manager and turn them into a great leader. It’s not some miracle machine. The truth is you need to have your foundations as a manager be solid first. AI is a good supplement for already successful managers.

Don’t use artificial intelligence to monitor

Often the first temptation of leaders experimenting with AI is to find a productivity AI tool out there, plug it into their IT systems, and start virtually looking over their team’s shoulders to monitor output. There are already dozens of stories…horror stories…of companies doing just that. And it’s not a good look, and deeply hurts morale.

If you need a technology tool to ensure your people are actually working when they say they are, you screwed up a long time ago—back during the hiring process.

And the current research on this isn’t in artificial intelligence’s favor. If AI is used to “collect and analyze data about workers,” then eight out of ten workers say AI use on them would definitely or probably make them feel inappropriately watched. In addition, about a one third of the public does not think AI would lead to equitable evaluations. A majority also agrees this would lead to the information collected about workers being misused (66%).

Artificial intelligence is good at turning anything and everything into a metric. Time is an easy metric. Number of sales calls is an easy metric. Messages on slack is an easy metric. How often you move your mouse is an easy, and terrifying, metric. But just because you have easy numbers to pull on your team doesn’t mean they are the right metrics to be pulling.

Leadership is really about people, not the metrics. How you solicit and give feedback is important. How you support and grow individual employees is important. Inspiring your team and being transparent is important. If you monitor your team endlessly, and your team knows that you’re outsourcing the process of harvesting that data with artificial intelligence, it creates distance between you and them.

And that ultimately works against you in the long run. People don’t like leaders who seem far from them and far from…reality.

Become fluent in artificial intelligence, or risk getting lost in translation

There’s some interesting data from Deloitte on AI that came out in Spring 2024. Organizations reporting “very high” Generative AI expertise expect to change their talent strategies even faster, with 32 percent already making changes. According to their findings, a lot of companies are redesigning work processes and changing workflows to integrate AI at different points.

You’re probably already experiencing this with Google, Microsoft and others integrating artificial intelligence into their core products like email and chats.

Another big focus is going to be on AI fluency. Deloitte found that 47 percent of respondents are dedicating time towards it. The leadership who gets educated on AI early, and keeps training consistently on as it develops, will be the best equipped to shepherd their teams going forward. It’s inevitable that career paths and job descriptions are going to evolve. It’s up to you to stay current.

You NEED to know what the technology is, how it’s being used, and how it’s helping those you’re serving. Be it clients, customers, the public–whomever. Saying you just typed some words into a text box and out came some more words….is not a good answer. Or a good look for you. You sound like you’re treating it like magic, when it’s actually just code.

Turn your conversations and meetings into a database

Middle managers spend a lot of time, arguably too much time, sending progress reports up the chain to the C-Suite and marching orders down to the individual contributors at the bottom. And there’s a fair amount of investigating to find out where things really stand, and time can be spent having to meet multiple people to get all the correct and current information. This is a time slog.

Meanwhile, there are dozens of AI tools now that just take notes. Notes from meetings. Notes from calls. They take the transcript and pair it down to the key takeaways, action items, attendance –a full brief for your records.

So, instead of asking someone to take notes during a meeting or having all your notes in the chat only to evaporate once the zoom call ends, you have a searchable document that you can reference, build on, and keep track of. New hires can use the database to catch up, and senior leaders can get a quick read of the progress and where everything stands.

Use AI/Chat bots to offload small, clerical questions

Here’s a situation: You run a small team and maybe you have a few new hires. You’re going to get a bunch of clerical questions from them over their first 90 days. That’s normal. That’s how it’s supposed to be. Onboarding takes time. “Who’s the point person for this? What’s so and so’s email from HR? What’s the policy for remote days at the company?”

Here’s where artificial intelligence can be really useful. Depending on the sort of chat platform you use– Slack, Teams, whatever, you could make a simple chat bot that you upload a full archive of the company’s policies and your own team norms, clerical details– everything new hires will probably ask you about. So, when those quick questions, quick stop-and-chats happen, the chat-bot can take care of that.

This shouldn’t subtract your time with your new hires. This just subtracts the lower stakes conversations. Now, you have more time for the high-level conversations with them. More coaching. More mentorship. More progression towards team goals. It might sound simple but…that’s because it is.

Use AI as an audience for decisions before taking them public

Being in a leadership role requires making decisive decisions. You include feedback and perspectives from your team as much as possible. Do the research. Talk to people. But then comes the actual decision making. And that is often just you, alone, with your thoughts.

Instead of making your pros and cons list, one practical thing to try is inputting proposed decisions or actions in an AI tool and then asking for all the counterpoints and possible outcomes.

You could even scale this out to your whole team. Ideally, teams should be leveraging task-focused conflict in team discussions to spark new and better ideas. But conflict can be tricky. So, what if AI is always the devil’s advocate? As your team is generating or discussing ideas, you can be feeding those ideas into an AI tool and asking it for counterpoints or how competitors might respond.

Don’t let it make the decision for you but do let it help guide you to possible solutions.

Get the legal clearance before going too deep

One last disclaimer: check with your human resources or your senior leadership, your informational technology (IT) people—or honestly, all of them—to know the boundaries you can work within when using AI tools.

Many of the tools out there are free and still in beta mode or come with a small fee. And most of the larger AI companies are taking whatever data you input and using it to better refine their product. Your company may have rules on the books about data privacy. Certainly, if you work in legal, healthcare, or government services, you’re dealing with sensitive data that may be protected.

Get clear answers before using any AI tools. Until someone above you with authority gives you the OK, you should probably just play with the tools on your own time with your own personal projects.

Conclusion

Artificial intelligence is just getting started in the workplace. And it’s all playing out in real time. If you’re a manager starting to get your hands dirty with these new tools, acknowledge to your team that this is all a work in progress and the norms around AI are likely to evolve. Be sure to keep the playing field level with your team. Practice that transparency, onboard everyone to the tools you’re using and that they can use and see where this takes you. Remember, AI, at its best, is here to enhance our human capabilities, not replace them.

AI will never take the place of a great boss…. but it might be better than being managed by a bad one.

Image credit: David Burkus

Originally published at https://davidburkus.com on September 9, 2024.

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Five Triggers of Burnout at Work

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Five Triggers of Burnout at Work

GUEST POST from David Burkus

Demands at work have been piling on in recent years. Including the demand on employees to continue to do more with less. And those demands come with a lot of potential burnout at work. Burnout at work is a series problem for most organizations. Burnout can lead to decreased productivity, increased absenteeism, and even physical and mental health issues.

It’s incumbent on every leader to be aware of and attempt to avoid burnout on their teams. But burnout isn’t always caused by asking too much of employees. Being overcapacity can be one element that triggers a burned-out team. But there are other triggers leaders need to be aware of.

In this article, we will explore the five triggers of burnout at work and discuss how leaders can mitigate them to create a more engaged and productive team.

Trigger 1: Lack of Margin

The first trigger of burnout at work is a lack of margin. As said above, often burnout happens because people are just at capacity. In many organizations, the reward for good work is more work. This can lead to employees constantly feeling overloaded with assignments and overwhelmed. To mitigate this, leaders can redistribute tasks more equitably and avoid rewarding good work with additional responsibilities. And they can identify priorities more clearly so teammates know what tasks matter most and which can afford to wait until later. In addition, regular individual check-ins and team-wide huddles can also help identify areas where margin can be borrowed from other team members, ensuring that everyone has a manageable workload.

Trigger 2: Lack of Control

The second trigger of burnout at work is a lack of control. Employees who feel they lack autonomy over their work are dramatically more likely to burnout than employees who can control certain elements of their job. In addition, employees who feel left out of the decision-making process and lack the necessary resources to do their job can quickly become burnt out. Leaders can address this trigger by providing employees with more autonomy in when, where, or how they work. This could involve flexible work hours, remote work options, or giving employees a say in the decision-making process. By empowering employees and giving them a sense of control over their work, leaders can help prevent burnout and increase job satisfaction.

Section 3: Lack of Clarity

The third trigger of burnout at work is a lack of clarity. Leaving employees without clear expectations or without a firm belief that increased effort will increase performance is leaving employees open to burnout. Vague job descriptions and frequent changes in roles and tasks can leave employees feeling uncertain and overwhelmed. This trigger can often sneak up on employees and their leaders because the demands of a job change over time, and gradually move people away from the role they were initially hired for. Without frequent updating of expectations and clear feedback, the job becomes ambiguous. Leaders can help avoid this through regular check-ins, clear project definitions, and resources to help employees achieve their tasks. Clear communication and setting realistic goals can go a long way in reducing burnout caused by a lack of clarity.

Section 4: Lack of Civility

The fourth trigger of burnout at work is a lack of civility. Working in a toxic team or organization can be extremely detrimental to one’s mental well-being and job satisfaction. Whether it’s a single individual or a bad boss, negative experiences in the workplace can quickly lead to burnout. This can happen even in overall positive company cultures, because one toxic boss or dysfunctional team can have an outsized effect on the team and its potential for burnout. Leaders can address this trigger by modeling respectful behavior and reinforcing expectations of respect and cohesion. Creating a positive and inclusive work culture where everyone feels valued and supported can help prevent burnout and foster a more harmonious work environment.

Section 5: Lack of Social Support

The fifth trigger of burnout at work is a lack of social support. Humans are social creatures—and work often meets a small or large part of our social needs. Feeling isolated and lonely at work can significantly contribute to burnout. Without social connections and friendships, employees may struggle to find motivation and support in their roles. Leaders can create opportunities for social support and friendships within the team by organizing team-building activities, encouraging collaboration, and fostering a sense of community. You can’t force people to be friends, but you can create the environment where friendships develop. And having friends at work can not only drive productivity but also decrease stress and enhance overall job satisfaction.

By addressing these triggers of burnout, leaders can create a work environment that promotes employee well-being, engagement, and productivity. Redistributing tasks, providing autonomy, ensuring clarity, promoting civility, and fostering social support are all essential steps in preventing burnout and creating a more positive and fulfilling work experience. And a positive work experience helps everyone do their best work ever.

Image credit: Pexels

Originally published at https://davidburkus.com on June 26, 2023.

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Performance Reviews Don’t Have to Suck

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Performance Reviews Don't Have to Suck

GUEST POST from David Burkus

Traditional annual performance reviews are confusing, dated, messy, time-consuming, and sometimes just plain inaccurate to what’s really going on in your team. As organizational psychologist Bob Sutton said, “If performance evaluations were a drug, they would not receive FDA approval. They have so many side effects, and so often fail.” According to a survey of 837 companies across the globe only about 1 in 4 companies in North America said their performance management systems were effective. And only-third of companies surveyed said their employees were evaluated fairly.

The employees and the employers have spoken.

The workplace, and work itself, has gone through some radical transformations in the past few years. It’s time performance reviews do the same. Managers don’t like evaluations because they can get confusing. It’s a hassle, and it feels like extra work on top of their existing work

Employees feel the pressure of being graded through a system that is confusing because typically it has the potential to make or break a potential raise for them. The intent of the review process—to fix problem areas, develop skills and set people up for success—breaks down into debates about what rating scales mean and the semantics of every definition.

And then there’s the time involved. On both sides of the review process, it just takes a long, long time. Adobe found that managers spent about 17 hours per employee on their performance reviews. You can interpret that amount of time two ways:

1) either managers are taking their time to thoughtfully reflect and analyze an individual’s performance and contributions over the course of a year, or 2) it’s an audacious amount of time that goes on top of regular meetings and check-ins about performance that happen naturally throughout the year.

But if you’re leaning toward the latter, trust your instincts.

How did performance reviews become so painful?

The Ranking Method, or stack ranking, or “rank and yank” was popularized by Jack Welch, the CEO of General Electric from 1981 to 2001. If you didn’t already know him as a very influential figure in corporate America, then you might recognize him as the mentor of Jack Donaguey on 30 Rock.

GE went through a massive hot streak through most of his tenure as CEO, and a lot of that success was attributed to his popularized ranking method of his employees. It worked like this:

The manager will have a list of all employees and will first choose the most valuable employee and put that name at the top. Then he or she will choose the least valuable employee and put that name at the bottom of the list. With the remaining employees, this process would be repeated.

In addition, there is a bell curve at play here. Not everyone is going to get a top rating or perfect marks, even if theoretically everyone on a team is a superstar and exceeds expectations. Under Jack Welch, in a team of 10, everyone knew only two of them would get a great rating, and at least one would get a negative rating, and possibly be…yanked.

This method or some variation of it became a norm at a lot of companies until about 2012 when more research started to come out and leaders were questioning whether the method was doing more harm than good.

Managers reported that people became obsessed with the rankings, and that it also created unhealthy, siloed competition between everyone, especially top performers. Great employees would distance themselves from other great employees out of fear they might fall in the rankings.

Great employees should be collaborating, not competing

Microsoft recently overhauled their performance review system after realizing how damaging rank-and-yank was to performance and morale. From 2000 to 2012, Microsoft’s market cap had declined from $510 billion to half of that value. Employees pointed their finger at one big reason for the nose-dive: Stack Ranking.

Turns out pitting your individual employees against one another created a culture where innovative ideas were killed, and fast. It was all about the rankings, and not about the actual work. Top performers were even ditching the company where more value was placed on the work and not just a metric.

So, Microsoft ditched the stack rankings. And a handful of other Fortune 500 companies quickly followed suit after finding the same negative effects. Motorola, Expedia, and Adobe were all yanking their rating methods in favor of more frequent, informal, focused conversations with individuals throughout the year.

Performance reviews should be an ongoing conversation

Removing the annual ritual of performance reviews and replacing them with more targeted sessions throughout the year may sound like more work, but it actually saves time. At least it did for Motorola which reported saving 50-70 percent of time spent on review processes after they ditched their once-a-year ranking method.

These check-ins don’t have to be grueling, high stakes sessions—in fact, they should be very informal. Just like the name suggests. A check-in. Schedule it sometime at the end of the month with your direct report and…check-in. The best check-ins hit on three topics: expectations, feedback, and professional growth. Don’t confuse this with just another stand-up, progress check that you usually do with your whole team.

And if you’re reading this as an individual manager, with no authority to ditch annual reviews, remember that nothing is stopping you from doing more frequent check-ins with your team. That will leave you better prepared when the annual performance review season comes up, and it will make them more willing to accept your feedback. The annual review becomes just another check-in.

Use AI, but sparingly

There is a lot of enthusiasm for AI and what it can do to make work easier. But as a leader, you should remain highly skeptical and cautious if you’re considering using AI tools in your performance review process. Pew Research came out with some recent data finding, not surprisingly, people are mixed on AI being used to monitor them in the workplace. Tracking especially.

Have AI help you figure out where to look, where to find problem areas. But AI shouldn’t be making decisions in the evaluations. Great teams are made up of humans, and when we evaluate others, we need to look them in the eye and come prepared to back up whatever we have to say, person to person. It can be an intensely vulnerable process, for both sides of the conversation. If you’re looking to bring in AI to make it easier on yourself as a manager, to take away the awkwardness you might feel when you have these conversations…you might not be cut out for being a manager.

Conclusion

The evolution from the rigid, competitive ranking systems of the past to the more flexible and supportive frameworks of today marks a significant shift in how companies view and value their employees. By focusing on development, continuous feedback, and a collaborative environment, modern businesses are paving the way for a more engaged and innovative workforce. This transformation not only enhances individual performance but also drives collective success, ensuring that the workplace remains becomes one where everyone can do their best work ever.

Image credit: Pexels

Originally published at https://davidburkus.com on August 26, 2024.

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A Manager’s Guide to Employee Engagement

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A Manager's Guide to Employee Engagement

GUEST POST from David Burkus

We need to talk about employee engagement surveys. It’s great news that organizations are paying attention to engagement and its impact on performance. The bad news is that senior leaders seem to want a clear metric to judge how satisfied and motivated their people are. Management requires metrics, after all. Decisions require data.

Employee engagement surveys are the tool of choice to measure a company’s employee experience, motivation, and overall culture. Gallup research suggests that employee engagement is linked to many other important organization metrics like productivity, employee retention, and profitability. Unfortunately, Gallup has also found engagement is on the decline across the United States, particularly among remote, hybrid, and younger workers.

Ultimately, the reasons for the recent employee engagement decline and the inability to turn it around stem from a few problems with how most leaders treat engagement as a concept and engagement surveys as a tool. In this article, we’re going to review the top three problems with employee engagement surveys and offer a solution for each one that will not only boost engagement scores…but will engage your people.

Employee Engagement Problem #1: People don’t take the surveys seriously

Employee engagement surveys are only as important as leadership says they are, and the reliability can be a little flawed. No, don’t throw out surveys completely because the data might be flawed, but it’s important to know the context of how this engagement data is collected.

Your employee gets an email. It typically goes something like this:

“Dear Valued Employees, Our company has brought in “GloboEngage360”, to survey different aspects of the company according to the point of view of its employees. This survey is not mandatory, but your feedback is greatly appreciated and will remain anonymous.” Sincerely, Management

Put yourself in an employee’s shoes. They have meetings all day. They have tasks to do and people to coordinate with. If it isn’t mandatory, something like this is going right to the bottom of the list of things to do, or just put into the trash immediately.

And most employee’s gut reaction to a message from leadership or outside consultants saying this is anonymous is, “This is definitely not anonymous.” So, will employees take this survey seriously at all? Hard to say. Is there some value to be had from collecting the data this way? A little, but it’s best used as a starting point into your own investigation into engagement.

But we also must consider leadership’s point of view. Survey goes out. The survey consultancy collects the data, makes a nice packet of insights, and boils down your people’s performance, happiness, and productivity all into nice little percentages. But the data is only as serious as the seriousness of the people who filled out the survey, and their seriousness is determined by how seriously they think leaders care about the survey.

Seriously.

Employee Engagement Solution #1: Share the results

This should be an easy thing to do. And it’s the easiest way to communicate that you’re serious about employee feedback and improving the employee experience. It’s a mystery why companies don’t typically share the results with those who took the survey. By not sharing, people can only speculate, and they’re probably going to go to draw the worst-case scenarios like “The company is going to restructure” or “My job is in jeopardy.”

So, share the results. You may not have gotten an accurate and serious picture of engagement in the results you’re sharing, but when employees see that you considered their responses and you’re making changes as a result, they’ll give these questions more consideration next time a survey is sent around.

To articulate that these surveys matter to your team, you don’t need to send them the entire data file or even the summary report the consulting firm created for you. It can be way simpler than that. Just take the time to share:

  • What positive results you’re proud of.
  • Why you’re so proud of those results.
  • What unexpected results you received.
  • And what you’ll be changing as a result.

That’s it. Just a simple email, memo, or quick video on what senior leadership learned from the survey and what they’ll be building upon or changing completely because of the survey.

Employee Engagement Problem #2: Leaders Interpret Data Wrong

After a survey is taken, the team from human resources or the consulting firm administering the survey will compile everything and prepare a summary report. And this is where things can go really wrong. Often the report is broken down by the different questions asked, and the lower scoring the question the more attention it gets. If one item is particularly low, then we start a company-wide initiative to improve on that one item. Because when leaders only look at the company-wide data, they tend to make decisions that impact everyone… company-wide.

But if your company has issues, there’s a chance it’s not in every single department or every single team. Most people’s experience of work isn’t reflective of the entire company. It’s a commentary on the parts of the company they work with. Company culture is the average of the culture on each individual team.

You know what happens next. Now your top performing teams are subject to mandatory programs that will slow them down, confuse them, and ultimately make them feel punished. Those top performing teams need to be protected!

Employee Engagement Solution #2: Look team-by-team, not company-wide

When you look at the data, don’t just take the overall metrics and run with them. If you have direct contact with the agency you used, ask them, or ask your HR or culture team, to get the metrics broken down to the team level, or as much functional or regional separation as you can get.

And then use those metrics to isolate the teams that are under-performing in whatever areas you measured and cater a solution to that team. Talk to that manager. Talk to the people on that team. See what’s going on.

The solution for that individual team is not going to be solved by a company-wide solution. Big initiatives that touch every team in a company with the intent to weed out a problem often are too broad and diluted to fix the issue.

So, break those numbers down to the team level. Then, help the team leaders that are dragging the overall numbers down-and reward the team leaders who are serving their people well. Building a company culture is about building strong team cultures. It takes time, effort, and more than just the numbers and one big solution.

Employee Engagement Problem #3: Surveys are too infrequent

Employee engagement surveys are typically done once a year. Maybe twice. Remember, people don’t want to be inundated with surveys all year, and leadership and HR teams know that. So, companies will concentrate on that one survey ask a year. And companies will rely on HR and culture teams to implement a workplace environment that is inclusive, sparking innovation, and motivates and engages people.

It makes sense not to administer formal surveys too frequently throughout the year. HR should be very judicial when sending out surveys. But just because you’re not surveying people regularly, doesn’t mean you can’t be monitoring employee engagement regularly.

Employee Engagement Solution #3: Keep the conversation going on the team level

Managers can do their own anecdotal surveys, better known as a “conversation” with their team.

You, as a leader of your team, are ultimately responsible for your employees’ engagement and for fostering a purposeful culture. A company’s culture is the aggregate of all the teams’ cultures. This work really falls to you. Have ongoing conversations with your team and in your individual check-ins. Ask them what projects are going well. Ask them what they’re energy levels are like. Ask them how they’re interacting with their teams. And most importantly, ask them if there’s anything you can help with.

If you keep an open dialogue with your team about how things are going, the metrics from a yearly survey will not surprise or shock you. If you’re good, you’ll know before the survey.

Conclusion

Remember, a company’s culture is the sum of its team cultures. Invest in your teams, have open communication, and the engagement numbers will take care of themselves.

There’s a tendency to treat employee engagement like the score of a game, and so we shouldn’t be surprised when people try to game the system and improve the score. But the point of collecting all that data isn’t to learn how to improve a number. It’s to know where we need to pay more attention to our people and how we can help them feel more connected to their work and to the team they work with.

Image credit: Pexels

Originally published at https://davidburkus.com on May 16, 2024.

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Do We Really Need Managers?

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Do We Really Need Managers?

GUEST POST from David Burkus

There have been SO many articles and books about this idea of flat organizations. No managers, no bosses, just passionate people solving problems and collaborating at ease.

Sounds great, right? Well, not if you’re a manager, obviously. But the concept sounds great, right? Less oversight, more trust, more autonomy, we all want that!

What these articles get wrong is this: the idea of managers, especially middle managers, being senseless buffoons or mere pawns with all the authority of a mall cop has gone too far. And the role of a middle manager needs a refresh, not an elimination. Middle managers are the unsung heroes of organizations. But these managers need to be leaders, not just human project management tools.

Where do we stand with managers, today?

The workplace changed a lot during the pandemic. We all came together, huddled from home, turned our kitchen table into a workstation, then our guest room or a corner in our living room to our home office, and overall, stayed productive. In the end, a lot of us felt we didn’t need a person hovering over our shoulder to keep us on track and working. So, logically, a lot of us felt we didn’t need a manager, and a lot of senior leaders felt maybe we could cut out some middle managers.

A survey by GoodHire in 2022, of workers in a variety of fields including education, finance, health care, marketing, and even science- found that 83% of American workers said they could do their own job without their managers. But paradoxically, GoodHire also found that 70% of American workers strongly enjoy or somewhat enjoy working for their manager. This finding is backed up by Pew Research which just released data in late 2023 finding that “a majority of workers give their boss high ratings.”

So, people like their bosses, but could do without them. What’s really going on here?

Why do we hate managers? (or think we do)

The brainless middle manager trope. It’s an old one. They’re in our shows, our movies, our social media posts. And, yeah, in our lives too. They show up late, leave early. They scrutinize everything you do. Track your tasks. Track your productivity. Track your success. Track your failures.

Middle managers today are basically glorified task managers, and that really must change. But…why are they glorified task managers in the first place?

Gallup just published the results of a massive study on managers. A key finding was that, right now, managers have more work to do, on a tighter budget with new teams. Managers are more likely to be burnt out, disengaged, and looking for a new job.

More work: Remember the remote and hybrid culture you probably had to facilitate from scratch with no experience with video software like Zoom and Webex? That was a huge undertaking. Managing people’s well-being wasn’t in the managerial job description before. Adding it may be long overdue, but it was still a task that managers feel ill-equipped to take on officially.

Less budget: The economy was a roller coaster for all industries over the last 4 years. And in response a lot of budgets froze or got tightened. Your company was probably hit in negative ways that affected resources that make your role easier.

New teams: There was a lot of quitting, layoffs, hiring, and job hopping that happened. Now, teams are shaken up, gone, or brand new.

When all these things compound, it makes sense middle managers are feeling squeezed, as Gallup put it.

And when you’re burnt out, disengaged, and looking for the next place to work, you’re going to become the bare minimum “glorified task manager” just making sure the wheels are spinning.

A manager should be a leader. Plain and simple. This isn’t just semantics. A leader is an inspirational figure that facilitates great work. Tools like Jira, Trello, Asana, they can keep track of tasks and you can check them from time to time. But it shouldn’t be the first thing a manager does: check the management software. Instead, check on the people!

What About Manager-less Companies?

It’s worth stating here that, none of this is new. The discussion about whether managers make a difference has been going on for a while, with both sides citing examples to suit their opinion.

On the manager-less company side, Washington-based Valve Software gets cited often. If you’ve ever played some of their most critically acclaimed video games like Half-Life and Portal, you’ve probably heard of them. They also created the Steam platform, which, again if you’re a gamer, you know well. Valve was started by two former Microsoft employees in the early 1990s and began, from the start, as a flat company. No managers, beyond the executive c-suite level. People decided what to work on, what to prioritize, and the company became a huge success. By a lot of metrics, it’s been a success. A little late on deadlines for game releases, but because they are so good, they’re often forgiven.

But here’s where it fell short. Priority is only given to what the majority of the organization prioritizes. At Valve, it was the product, the critically acclaimed games and the Steam platform. What wasn’t prioritized? Diversity. Even for a tech company, even for a gaming company, the demographics are predominantly white and male. This discrepancy came to a boiling point in 2020 when the executive leaders were blindsided by rising social issues and criticized for their silence both internally and externally.

Other companies like Medium and Zappos rolled back their manager-less structures. At Medium, they said the structure-less structure impacted the ability to scale and the time-consuming nature of it all. It also negatively affected recruiting. It all seemed cool, but risky. Zappos said it took the attention away from the customer, and customer service was what they were known for.

These aren’t the only organizations to have ever tried manager-less organizational designs. There’s a whole organization that catalogs them. In total, about 250 companies use a manager-less structure. But most of them have under 50 employees. And nearly all of them started as a manager-less company-they didn’t just wake up and decide their thousands of employees could suddenly manage themselves.

I should be clear: I’m rooting for those places and others to work. I’m in favor of any organization that helps people do their best work. I just personally believe it’s better to bet on talented people and great teams than on a seemingly perfect organizational design.

Managers have a great impact, good and bad

When you think about who your mentors are or people who have impacted you the most in life, outside of your family, I bet you’re thinking of a teacher that really inspired you early in your life, maybe your first basketball coach, or some other authority figure that took the time to understand you and teach you some valuable skills. In other words, you think of a manager.

In organizations, managers make up about 70% of the variance in team engagement. They have a tremendous impact on whether companies succeed or fail. 82% of American workers said they would potentially quit their job because of a bad manager. The impact and stakes are REAL.

Like it or not, the work we do in our lives defines a big chunk of who we are. And managers really hold the power in making our work fulfilling, or a mindless grind. Right now, things are bleak. The more work, less budget, brand new teams, the burn out. The ripple effects that come from the manager level go so far and so wide. But there is a way to help them.

Employees need more training and paths upward

People who are promoted to managers often are promoted because they are really good at their individual contributor skillset, and the only way to climb the corporate ladder is to get promoted and manage people. Hard truth here: not everyone is cut out to be a manager; not everyone even wants to be a manager.

Gallup found that only 48% of managers strongly agree that they currently have the skills needed to be exceptional at their job. And only three in 10 hybrid managers have received any formal training on leading hybrid teams.

Authors and McKinsey consultants Bill Schaninger, Bryan Hancock, and Emily Fieldhave an interesting thought about this in their newest book. Instead of promoting someone who is really good at their craft to a management role, there should be master tracks for technical areas. And putting your best technical person in a management role might drain them of that fire that made them so good in the first place.

Moving up in your company should not be tied exclusively to managing people. And if you promote people to those roles, you need a plan to train them. In fact, before promoting them it’s worth creating a trial project they can manage or put them in charge of interns for a summer. As Bill Schaninger said, “The first time someone does something shouldn’t be after they’ve already gotten the job.”

As a manager, it’s also part of your job (I know, another task, but it’s important) to develop members of your team. Maybe they’ll be managers one day, maybe they’ll even be your manager one day if you train them well enough. Your team is on a path in their career. Their jobs will fluctuate, people will move on, move up, change course, and so coaching them is crucial. Remember, the impact of a manager on someone’s life can be huge. There’s a lot of influence here.

Managers are not task managers, they are leaders.

Focus on the team, not the individual

Now, if you are a manager, it’s imperative that you resist the tendency to micromanage-the feeling of every little task being tracked is likely what created the motivation to fire managers in the first place. So, focus on the team as a whole, not the individual. Great leadership is about letting the team hold itself accountable.

You need to do your one-on-one meetings to check-in with your people and make sure there’s not any glaring individual performance issues. But great leaders are about teaching the team to hold itself accountable. Great leaders often come off more as facilitators who are there to guide and support the team as they divvy up tasks and co-create the best strategy.

Even when you’re doing your individual check-ins, I recommend a 10–10–10 format. If you have 30 minutes to check in with each person every other week, then spend only 10 minutes of that time focused on their actual performance as an individual. Spend the next 10 minutes focused on the team, how the team is supporting them, and how they are contributing to the team. Then spend the final 10 minutes on how you’re doing as their manager. Ask where you could improve and what support they need from you.

No one wants a 30-minute discussion around their performance flaws, but most people respond positively when the bulk of the time is spent focused on how their team and their boss can help them.

Final Thoughts

So, do we really need managers? Yes, but in a capacity that reflects the evolving needs of modern workplaces. As we look ahead, let’s champion a new breed of leaders-managers who not only oversee projects but also empower people, shape culture, and turn challenges into opportunities for growth.

Image credit: Pexels, Pew Research

Originally published at https://davidburkus.com on April 16, 2024.

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Optimizing Employee One-On-Ones

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Optimizing Employee One-On-Ones

GUEST POST from David Burkus

One-on-one meetings with employees are a crucial aspect of effective leadership. Organizations spent countless hours, money, and other resources trying to find the most qualified talent on board, and then spent more money to keep that talent motivated and engaged. And yet, the single most time time-efficient and effective way to invest in the growth and development of employees is a simple feedback session with their direct supervisor.

In this article, we will delve into the three main sections that make up a successful one-on-one meeting: expectations, feedback, and growth and development. By following this structure, you can ensure that your meetings are productive and meaningful, leading to improved performance and employee satisfaction.

Expectations

The first part of your one-on-one meetings with employees should focus on expectations. Setting clear objectives and expectations is the foundation of any successful working relationship. During one-on-one meetings, it is essential to discuss and align on these expectations to ensure that everyone is on the same page. By doing so, you can monitor progress, celebrate achievements, and identify any factors that may be affecting performance.

By setting clear objectives and roles, you provide your employees with a sense of direction and purpose. This clarity allows them to focus their efforts on the most important tasks and prioritize their work effectively. Monitoring progress and celebrating achievements not only boosts morale but also provides an opportunity to recognize and reward outstanding performance. Additionally, by identifying factors that may be affecting performance, you can work together to find solutions and remove any obstacles that may hinder progress.

Feedback

The second part of your one-on-one meetings with employees should focus on feedback. Feedback is a powerful tool for growth and improvement. During one-on-one meetings, it is crucial to provide fair feedback that highlights both areas of high performance and areas for improvement. By acknowledging and appreciating the employee’s strengths, you motivate them to continue excelling in those areas. Simultaneously, by providing constructive feedback, you help them identify areas where they can grow and develop.

This section is also meant to be a two-way conversation. This is a time for employees to give you feedback as well. How are you doing as their manager? What resources do they need that you can provide? Encourage your employees to share their thoughts and ideas, and actively listen to their feedback. By fostering a safe and supportive environment, you can build trust and strengthen the relationship with your team members.

Growth and Development

The final part of your one-on-one meetings with employees should discuss the employees’ growth and development. Take the time to discuss their long-term career goals, the skills they want to develop, and potential future roles they aspire to. Understanding your employees’ career aspirations allows you to tailor their development plans and provide them with the necessary resources and opportunities to achieve their goals. By identifying the skills and knowledge they need to grow, you can offer targeted training and development programs. Additionally, supporting employees in their current roles by assigning challenging projects or providing mentorship opportunities can facilitate their growth and prepare them for future roles within the organization.

This section should focus on the real and accurate career objectives of employees. Unfortunately, too often employees who lack trust in their boss or the company invent false ambitions (“I want to be a manager” or “I’m here for the long-term.”) It’s okay if some employees decide their long-term goals will take them away from the organization. Leaders can still invest in their growth, and they can still be high performers in the meantime.

One-on-one meetings with employees are a valuable investment of time and effort. By following the threefold structure of expectations, feedback, and growth and development, you can create a supportive and engaging work environment. Candid and honest conversations in these meetings can lead to faster growth and better results than formal annual reviews or performance improvement plans.

Remember, the order of the three sections is important, as ending on growth and development helps make the conversation forward-looking and motivating. By setting clear expectations, providing constructive feedback, and supporting your employees’ growth, you can foster a culture of continuous improvement and help everyone on your team do their best work ever.

Image credit: Pexels

Originally published at https://davidburkus.com on September 18, 2023.

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Team Motivation Does Not Have to be Hard

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Team Motivation Does Not Have to be Hard

GUEST POST from David Burkus

How do you make your team care about the work they are doing?

If you’re a manager, you’ve probably asked that question a few times in your career. And you’ve probably made some attempts at motivating your team already. Did you whip out the company mission statement? How did that go over?

Even if you think your team is doing the most boring work, like turning numbers into different numbers on a computer screen, you can still inspire your team to feel something in their work. This is such a crucial part of great leadership, and it’s not something you can fake or beg people to do.

Employees don’t want mission statements or half-hearted enthusiasm to lift their spirits at work. They want to feel meaning in their work and understand their impact beyond the bottom line or increasing shareholder value.

They want to know “What good is our work doing?”

We want to know our work has a rationale behind it—a purpose, no matter how small. And lack of any rationale or contribution creates a lack of motivation.

The key to motivating your team is to show them the meaning in their work and to help them know their impact. These terms may sound similar, but there are subtle differences that make each important. Meaning is knowing that your contribution counts, that your task isn’t just busy work, and that what you literally do contributes to the larger picture of the business. Impact is knowing who is counting on you.

Most of us think of meaning with a capital M. It’s why we think of doctors, nurses, or firefighters as doing Meaningful work. They’re saving lives. But the research on human motivation and team collaboration suggests something different. It’s okay to offer lowercase m meaning as well. In fact, it’s more than ok. Small m meaning dramatically increases the big M: Motivation.

For impact, well, think about the last time you felt engaged and motivated at work, or the last time you worked on a team that was inspiring and energizing to be a part of. You’re probably not thinking about the last time your boss recited the company mission statement verbatim.

Instead, you’re probably thinking about the last time you got a “thank you” from a client or coworker, or when you found out how your work mattered to someone else.

Taken together – meaning and impact, create what is called a “Pro-social purpose.” And research suggests motivating you team with prosocial purpose leaves them not only more motivated to pursue objectives, but also more likely to work together as a team.

Take KPMG’s approach for instance. Struggling with low morale, they didn’t just throw perks or pay raises at the problem. Instead, they turned to storytelling, launching the “We Shape History” campaign in 2014. The goal of the campaign was to showcase pivotal moments in history that KPMG as a firm was involved in. KPMG managed the logistics of the Lend-Lease Act during World War II, which helped the United States aid the allies. KPMG audited the 1994 South African Presidential Election, which saw Nelson Mandela make history as the first black president. The campaign worked to raise awareness of the impact KPMG’s past work had on history, but what happened next worked even better to raise morale.

After being inspired, employees were then tasked with finding the impact their roles had—at their level. Not a companywide impact, but how their work made an impact from an individual level. They set up an app on the company’s internal website that let any of the 30,000 plus employee submit their own stories. They called it the “10,000 Stories Challenge,” but didn’t take long for them to blow past that target.

Within 6 months, KPMG had collected 42,000 stories, with powerful examples of personal impact like:

“I help farmers grow – because I support the farm credit system that keeps family farms in business.”

“I restore neighborhoods – because I audit community development programs that revitalize low-income communities.”

“I combat terrorism – because I help banks prevent money laundering that can go toward terrorism.”

Leadership at the company got the results they wanted. Employees felt their work made more of a difference. Retention was better. The company became a top place to work.

Purpose became a regular conversation on the individual team level.

Research on Prosocial Purpose

In 2014, researcher Adam Grant and his colleagues were working with their university’s donation call center. These call centers are manned by student workers who are given a list of alumni and a phone and tasked with calling each person and reading from a script that always ends in a request for a donation. The job is boring. It’s draining to be hung up on, yelled at, or worse. It’s relatively thankless. In fact, when Grant and his colleagues showed up, the first thing they noticed when touring the call center was a sign in one student’s cubicle. It read “Doing a good job here is like wetting your pants in a dark suit, you get a warm feeling but no one else notices.”

The researchers wanted them to feel noticed—but obviously not for wetting themselves. They wondered if getting the call center employees to notice the difference they were making would have a motivating effect on them. So, they took the break time student workers received and used it to run an experiment. During a five-minute break, some of the workers were visited by a fellow student who had received scholarship funds raised by the call center and they heard how receiving the funds had positively impacted him.

And when the researchers followed up a month later, they noticed that just that small meeting with a scholarship recipient had a big impact on the callers. The workers who got to meet the people directly served by their work worked twice as hard. They made double the number of calls per hour and spent double the number of minutes on the phone. Their weekly revenue went from an average of around $400 to more than $2,000 in donations.

It’s impossible to overstate how big this effect is.

The workers didn’t get any additional perks or benefits. They didn’t get any training. And they certainly didn’t get asked to memorize and internalize the university’s mission statement. Instead, they got a five-minute chat with someone whose life was made better by the work they were doing.

Putting Prosocial Purpose Into Practice

So, when it comes to motivating your team, the key is to demonstrate to your colleagues the work they’re doing is meaningful and has an impact is a big part of their job. Maybe the most important. Prosocial purpose won’t happen overnight, but here are a few things to bring Meaning to the forefront and have Impact lead the way.

1. Tactic: Make metrics meaningful.

Organizations love metrics. They’re what allow the company to assess the performance of the business and their employees. They can be insightful. They can be cruel. But metrics aren’t meaning. Performance metrics get senior leaders excited when they show business is booming. And managers feel crummy when performance metrics for their team are lagging.

Often the blur of trackable metrics makes it difficult to remember why metrics matter. That’s why you as a leader need to readily remind your team. Use metrics that inspire meaning.

2. Tactic: Share a win every day.

Most organizations celebrate wins, but they’re often limited to the successful end of a project or hitting an important milestone. But on the team level, high-performing teams share wins much more frequently. It may sound like that’s taking too much time for something of too little importance, you’re wrong. People get bogged down on the small tasks that make up the day-to-day experience. You might have established meaning, but it’s like a muscle. It’ll go away if you don’t exercise it. Remind your team. Find wins and express them to the team. And where appropriate, go more public past your team. This sounds simple but imagine yourself in their position. A win is a win, no matter who you are. Wins feel good. Wins create meaning.

3. Tactic: Collect Impact Stories

KPMG was certainly the best example of this. You as a leader need to be on the lookout. Collect threads wherever they come from. Part of being a good leader is keeping tabs on those stories and using them to create that prosocial purpose. And take a note from KPMG to– bring your team into the storytelling process. Have them find impact in their role. But as their manager, keep most of the storytelling work on your plate. Collect them, showcase them, and keep them coming.

4. Tactic: Pause for Purpose

You know – when people talk about jobs with real meaning and impact, we’re quick to say teacher, firefighter, doctors, or nurses. And we’re correct, those are jobs that have and provide a TON of meaning. Do doctors and nurses need reminding of their purpose? Well, consider this: at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the entire team of surgeons, nurses, and support staff pause before every surgery to take a moment to remember the patient they are about to operate on. They break up what would be a routine procedure with a powerful reminder of the humanity behind what they’re doing.

If prominent surgeons are pausing for purpose, you and your team can do this too.

5. Tactic: Outsource Inspiration

Teams, especially at the entry-level, can be put far from the people who they serve. A customer testimonial video or comment only goes so far. Think of this as an extension of the impact story tactic. Bring the story to them. Bring in clients or customers to meet with your team, even just briefly. It only took 5 min for the call center to be inspired. Or if you need to, send them to the story. Take your team out of the office, out of the zoom meeting, and into the world where their impact is. Field trips aren’t just for elementary schools.

Conclusion

On first reading, a lot of this article might sound difficult. It reads like fancy business school jargon on motivating your team. But it’s actually relatively simple. In fact, the entire article can be summarized in just a single sentence.

“People want to do work that matters, and they want to work for leaders who tell them they matter.”

No matter where you get started as long as it’s in the service of one of those things—letting them know their work matters and letting them know they matter to you—you’ll be moving the needle on how much your team feels inspired and how much they feel energized to do work and you didn’t even have to recite the company’s mission statement which is actually a lot harder to remember than anything in this article.

Image credit: 1 of 850+ FREE quote slides available at http://misterinnovation.com

Originally published at https://davidburkus.com on March 17, 2024.

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